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Dr. Andrew Huberman — A Neurobiologist on Optimizing Sleep, Enhancing Performance, Reducing Anxiety, Increasing Testosterone, and Using the Body to Control the Mind (#521)

Tim Ferriss — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 17:21:49 +0000

Illustration via 99designs

“Use the body to control the mind.”
— Dr. Andrew Huberman

Andrew Huberman, PhD (@hubermanlab), is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function, and neural plasticity. Andrew is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation fellow and recipient of the 2017 Cogan Award for his discoveries in the study of vision. Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford Medicine has been consistently published in top journals including Nature, Science, and Cell.

Andrew is host of the Huberman Lab podcast, which he launched in January of this year. The show aims to help viewers and listeners improve their health with science and science-based tools. New episodes air every Monday on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.

Brought to you by Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement, Theragun percussive muscle therapy devices, and Helix Sleep premium mattresses. More on all three below.

You can find the transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

Listen onApple Podcasts

Listen onSpotify

Listen onOvercast

#521: Dr. Andrew Huberman — A Neurobiologist on Optimizing Sleep, Enhancing Performance, Reducing Anxiety, Increasing Testosterone, and Using the Body to Control the Mind

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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

Want to hear an episode with someone else who casually enjoys the thrill of a cage-free shark adventure? Lend an ear to my conversation with TOMS Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie, in which we discuss serial entrepreneurship, his own pattern disruption with the Hoffman Process, a public service announcement for the psychedelically curious, the relationship dynamics of conscious uncoupling, and much more.

#446: Blake Mycoskie — TOMS, The Hoffman Process, Conscious Uncoupling, and Psychedelics

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Dr. Andrew Huberman:

Website | Twitter | YouTube | Instagram

SHOW NOTES

Why might vision be a secret to surviving 2020 — or any year, for that matter? [05:41]
Visual considerations for optimizing sleep quality. [15:11]
A simple new routine that’s been elevating my mood in the mornings, and what Andrew recommends for timing circadian biology to, as wise bards of yore have proclaimed, accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. [18:25]
When is the ideal time to get morning light exposure, and how can we use an understanding of our body temperature minimum to shift our circadian clock if we want to avoid jet lag and the impact of working at odd hours? [23:55]
Why Andrew is not a fan of melatonin as a sleep aid, and what he recommends instead. [31:03]
Andrew’s thoughts on taking phosphatidylserine before sleep to help blunt cortisol release, and what he uses to similar effect. [37:15]
The real reason why Andrew applies the term NSDR (non-sleep deep rest) to yoga nidra and a free hypnosis app called Reveri, and the value someone might find in their practice no matter what they decide to call them. [42:26]
What are physiological sighs, and how can we use them at any time to reduce stress without the burden of preparation other protocols demand? [47:43]
Andrew explains what hypnosis is and determines how susceptible to it I would be. [52:26]
What are some of the most practical applications of hypnosis, and do the states induced by it have any shared characteristics with those induced by psychedelics? [56:27]
Considering the future of beneficial brain change and the synergestic combinations that might just get us there. [1:04:06]
With a past that wouldn’t suggest a tenured future in academia and a penchant for fighting, what happened to Andrew on July 4th of 1994 that changed the trajectory of his life? [1:07:58]
Why taking a leave of absence from university isn’t the same thing as dropping out — no matter how many tech founder origin stories like to paint their subject in the glamorous, devil-may-care light of the latter rather than the pragmatic former. [1:15:02]
How Andrew’s “magical” childhood pivoted to one of tension, disruption, and depression almost overnight, and what he did at the time (and in many ways is still doing) to cope. [1:17:38]
What is the Hoffman Process, and how has it helped Andrew? [1:28:44]
If Hoffman was just one of four or five things that had a disproportionately positive impact on Andrew, what are some of those other things? [1:33:00]
On pets and mortality, canine research with rapamycin, and why any scientist gunning for a Nobel Prize might not be amiss by changing their surname to Sabatini or Kornberg. [1:37:46]
If you like tales of adventure, listen to Andrew talk about that time he went exit cage diving with great white sharks, a bunch of madmen in Mexico, and breathless undersea technical difficulties — for science! Then marvel at what he did to purge himself of the fear, anxiety, and trauma of the experience. [1:39:11]
How does Andrew define fear, and has he always been fascinated by it? [1:47:00]
What is turmeric’s effect on DHT? Would finasteride (Propecia) behave similarly? [1:50:15]
Underscoring how powerful DHT is with the phenomenon of the Dominican Republic’s guevedoce. [1:55:57]
Does Andrew think a compound responsible for DHT inhibition could influence the gender of a pregnant woman’s offspring? A late colleague’s story might have some answers. [1:57:44]
What does Andrew recommend for optimizing testoterone? [2:00:05]
It’s very hard to get a biological free lunch: the perils of testosterone replacement therapy and other testosterone-boosting efforts done haphazardly. [2:05:45]
Why messing with hormone balance can actually accelerate aging. [2:09:44]
Andrew’s thoughts on cognitive enhancement from the pharmacological/supplement side. [2:12:27]
Why yerba mate is my favorite caffeine vehicle, and a recommendation from Andrew. [2:15:09]
Why you might benefit from waiting 90 minutes to two hours after waking to ingest your first cup of caffeine, and what we can learn from Roland Griffiths’ excursions into the realm of caffeine research. [2:16:43]
Is there a way to counteract the effects of caffeine? [2:18:24]
What is the vagus nerve, and why is it fascinating on the fronts of physiology and psychiatry? [2:21:57]
What books has Andrew gifted most to other people? [2:28:43]
What would Andrew’s billboards say? [2:31:20]
Parting thoughts. [2:34:05]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

The post Dr. Andrew Huberman — A Neurobiologist on Optimizing Sleep, Enhancing Performance, Reducing Anxiety, Increasing Testosterone, and Using the Body to Control the Mind (#521) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Dr. Peter Attia on Longevity Drugs, Alzheimer’s Disease, and the 3 Most Important Levers to Pull (#517)

Tim Ferriss — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 14:06:30 +0000

“Caloric restriction, dietary restriction, time restriction. You’ve probably heard me go on and on about my framework, the three levers. Always pull one, sometimes pull two, occasionally pull three, never pull none.”
— Peter Attia

Dr. Peter Attia (PeterAttiaMD.com) is a former ultra-endurance athlete (e.g., swimming races of 25 miles), a compulsive self-experimenter, and one of the most fascinating human beings I know. He is one of my go-to doctors for anything performance or longevity related.

But here is his official bio to do him justice:

Peter is a physician focusing on the applied science of longevity. His practice deals extensively with nutritional interventions, exercise physiology, sleep physiology, emotional and mental health, and pharmacology to increase lifespan (how long you live), while simultaneously improving healthspan (how well you live).

Peter trained for five years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in general surgery, where he was the recipient of several prestigious awards, including Resident of the Year, and the author of a comprehensive review of general surgery. He also spent two years at NIH as a surgical oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute, where his research focused on immune-based therapies for melanoma. He has since been mentored by some of the most experienced and innovative lipidologists, endocrinologists, gynecologists, sleep physiologists, and longevity scientists in the United States and Canada.

Peter earned his M.D. from Stanford University and holds a B.Sc. in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics.

Peter also hosts The Drive, a weekly, deep-dive podcast focusing on maximizing longevity and all that goes into that, from physical to cognitive to emotional health. It features topics including fasting, ketosis, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, mental health, and much more. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Ov ercast, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the interview on YouTube.

Brought to you by Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement, Oura smart ring wearable for personalized sleep and health insights, and Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating. More on all three below.

You can find the transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

Listen onApple Podcasts

Listen onSpotify

Listen onOvercast

#517: Dr. Peter Attia on Longevity Drugs, Alzheimer's Disease, and the 3 Most Important Levers to Pull

This episode is brought to you by Oura! Oura is the company behind the smart ring that delivers personalized sleep and health insights to help you optimize just about everything. I’ve been using it religiously for at least six months, and I was introduced to it by Dr. Peter Attia. It is the only wearable that I wear on a daily basis.

With advanced sensors, Oura packs state-of-the-art heart rate, heart-rate variability, temperature, activity, and sleep monitoring technology into a convenient, noninvasive ring. It weighs less than 6 grams and focuses on three key insights—sleep, readiness, and activity.

Try it for yourself. The Oura Ring comes in two styles and three colors: Silver, Black, and Matte Black. For $299, you can give or get the gift of health by visiting OuraRing.com.

This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep! Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature.

Go to EightSleep.com/Tim and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

Want to hear Peter’s last time on the show? Listen to this conversation in which we discuss Centenarian Olympics, goblet squats, dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, intra-abdominal pressure, egg boxing, tearing phone books in half, archery hunting, non-fixed personality traits, podcasting pointers, and much more.

#398: Peter Attia, M.D. — Fasting, Metformin, Athletic Performance, and More

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Peter Attia:

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

SHOW NOTES

What is a liquid biopsy, and why is Peter excited about this recent innovation? How does it work, what is it good at detecting, and why does Peter consider the bureaucratic red tape snagging its rollout a “tragedy?” [07:22]
The four pillars of exercise someone seeking to improve their metabolic health should understand. [19:38]
A few of the major causes for modern posture problems, and methods for remedying them. [22:06]
If Peter were Czar for a day, here’s how he’d train children to grow up into a more habitually active adulthood. [27:23]
What is zone two training, and what is it designed to do? [30:35]
Why a ketogenic diet won’t necessarily make you lose weight (nor will an all-Doritos or all-Twizzlers diet, for that matter). [32:43]
What Peter has learned about fasting since the last time we talked. [35:01]
The pros and cons of front-loading one’s meals when observing time-restricted feeding (aka intermittent fasting). [39:08]
The three levers of Peter’s nutritional framework: caloric restriction, dietary restriction, time restriction. “Always pull one, sometimes pull two, occasionally pull three, never pull none.” [43:16]
Does Peter recommend using branched-chain amino acids to mitigate muscle loss during a fast? [47:52]
Thoughts on a recent New England Journal paper comparing the effects of Lexapro to psilocybin in patients with depression, and how you can (and why you should) increase your scientific literacy to best understand the results of such papers. [49:47]
Why the research around MDMA as a treatment for patients with PTSD comes to clearer conclusions than the study comparing Lexapro and psilocybin. [1:10:30]
How is Peter’s thinking evolving around apoB and its relationship to cholesterol control in the body? [1:12:24]
Are there any benefits to low apoB outside of lowering cardiovascular risk? [1:24:27]
What is Mendelian randomization, how does it allow us to infer cause when an experiment is not done, and how was it used recently to understand the correlation between lower apoB and improved all-cause mortality? [1:26:05]
Is Peter more bearish or bullish on rapamycin since the last time we discussed it? As someone who’s not receiving an organ transplant, why has he been taking it for the past three years? [1:29:03]
Beyond potentially increasing lifespan, do we know if rapamycin can reverse aging-related impairments to our healthspan, such as hearing loss? [1:40:19]
What are some of the other pharmacological candidates for extending lifespan or healthspan that Peter currently finds interesting? How does someone bring potential candidates to the attention of the ITP? [1:44:42]
How the Age of COVID may have finally driven Peter (and his poor family with whom he’s been locked down) bananas. [1:53:16]
Why Peter has become bullish on the efficacy of saunas no matter how vigorously the Finns try to sway him otherwise. [1:55:24]
Peter’s preferred method of zone two training. [1:59:57]
Peter’s thoughts on semaglutide, the new drug treatment for chronic weight management that was just approved by the FDA. [2:00:39]
Peter’s resources and recommendations for people who want to further step up their scientific literacy, improve their ability to separate fact from fiction, and discern hype from reality. [2:09:17]
On the botanical origins of certain Central American spirits, and the only thing about Texas that Peter doesn’t like (so far). [2:11:38]
Decaffeinated brands, Tommy Want Wingy, and other parting thoughts. [2:14:20]
As promised, here’s the segment detailing everything you ever wanted to know about zone two training: aerobic efficiency, what happens on a chemical level, current research, minimum effective dose, and long-term adaptations and benefits. [2:16:50]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

The post Dr. Peter Attia on Longevity Drugs, Alzheimer’s Disease, and the 3 Most Important Levers to Pull (#517) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Peter Attia, M.D. — Fasting, Metformin, Athletic Performance, and More (#398)

Tim Ferriss — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 21:37:44 +0000

Photo by Tyler Ruiz

“If you’re really committed to brain health, you want to be exercising every day.” — Peter Attia

Dr. Peter Attia (peterattiamd.com, TW: @PeterAttiaMD, IG: @peterattiamd, FB: @peterattiamd) is a former ultra-endurance athlete (e.g., swimming races of 25 miles), a compulsive self-experimenter, and one of the most fascinating human beings I know. He is one of my go-to doctors for anything performance- or longevity-related. He is also easily the best quarterback and sherpa for the US medical system I’ve ever met.

But here is his official bio to do him justice:

Peter is the founder of Attia Medical, PC, a medical practice with offices in San Diego and New York City, focusing on the applied science of longevity. The practice applies nutritional biochemistry, exercise physiology, sleep physiology, techniques to increase distress tolerance, lipidology, pharmacology, and four-system endocrinology to increase lifespan (delaying the onset of chronic disease), while simultaneously improving healthspan (quality of life).

Peter trained for five years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in general surgery, where he was the recipient of several prestigious awards, including resident of the year, and the author of a comprehensive review of general surgery. He also spent two years at NIH as a surgical oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute where his research focused on immune-based therapies for melanoma. He has since been mentored by some of the most experienced and innovative lipidologists, endocrinologists, gynecologists, sleep physiologists, and longevity scientists in the United States and Canada.

Peter earned his M.D. from Stanford University and holds a B.Sc. in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics.

Peter also hosts The Drive, a weekly, ultra-deep-dive podcast focusing on maximizing health, longevity, critical thinking, and a few other things. Topics include fasting, ketosis, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, mental health, and much more. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform.

You can find the transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

#398: Peter Attia, M.D. — Fasting, Metformin, Athletic Performance, and More

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts.
Stream by clicking here.
Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as.”

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BeetElite is Informed-Sport Certified, and the team at HumanN is making an offer exclusive to my listeners: Take your performance to the next level with BeetElite by going to LiveHuman.com/Tim to get 20% off your first purchase!

This podcast is also brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.

New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world’s best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand.

Peloton is offering listeners to this show a special offer: Enter the code you heard during the Peloton ad of this episode at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. That’s onepeloton.com and enter the code you heard during the Peloton ad of this episode to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase.

Want to hear the first time Peter was on the podcast? — Listen to our conversation here. In that interview, we discuss optimizing blood testing, drinking “jet fuel,” training for ultra-endurance sports, consuming synthetic ketones, using metabolic chambers, extending longevity by avoiding certain types of exercise, and much more. (Stream below or right-click here to download.)

#50: Dr. Peter Attia on Life-Extension, Drinking Jet Fuel, Ultra-Endurance, Human Foie Gras, and More

QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Peter Attia:

Website | Podcast | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

Dr. Peter Attia vs. Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show #352
My Life Extension Pilgrimage to Easter Island, The Tim Ferriss Show #193
Dr. Peter Attia on Life-Extension, Drinking Jet Fuel, Ultra-Endurance, Human Foie Gras, and More, The Tim Ferriss Show #50
Training for the Centenarian Olympics, Dr. Mark Hyman
Alzheimer’s Disease Symptoms and Causes, The Mayo Clinic
How to Goblet Squat, Men’s Health
Sarcopenia, Wikipedia
My Dog Toaster was Attacked by a Raccoon, Kevin Rose
7 Things You Didn’t Know about Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS), Athletes Edge
Hex Deadlift Bar, Rogue Fitness
Isometric vs. Concentric vs. Eccentric, James Braithwaite
Intra-Abdominal Pressure: An Integrative Review, NCBI
Metformin: Side Effects, Dosages, Treatment, Interactions, RxList
Nir Barzilai, M.D.: How to Tame Aging, The Drive #35
The 5 Training Zones, Vinnie Tortorich
Mitochondria, Nature Education
The Role of Glycogen in Diet and Exercise, Verywell Fit
Acarbose: Side Effects, Dosage, Uses, and More, Healthline
Egg Boxing, Peter Attia
The World’s Largest Psychedelic Research Center, The Tim Ferriss Show #385
F1.com: The Official Home of Formula 1
What is the Institutional Review Board (IRB)? Oregon State University
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Autophagy: Definition, Diet, Fasting, Cancer, Benefits, and More, Healthline
AMA #2: The Nothingburger — Results from Peter’s Week-Long Fast between Two Weeks of Nutritional Ketosis — and Answering Questions on All Things Fasting, The Drive #11
Wanna Know What Keeps Me Up at Night? Peter Attia
What Are the Differences between an Isocaloric Diet and a Eucaloric Diet? Quora
Ketosis — Advantaged or Misunderstood State? Peter Attia
SlowMag
L-Threonate
APOE Gene, Genetics Home Reference, NIH
Tim Ferriss: Depression, Psychedelics, and Emotional Resilience, The Drive #01
I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression by Terrence Real
Peter Demonstrates How to Tear a Phone Book in Half, Instagram
Sitka Gear
Performance Archery, San Diego
Peter Attia, The Joe Rogan Experience #1108
Tim Ferriss Learns Archery, Archery Tag
Pheasants, Grouse, and Allies, The Cornell Lab
Nock On Podcast by John Dudley
RX-3 Bow, Hoyt
Compound Bow, Wikipedia
Nock 2 It Custom Release, Nock On Archery
Silverback Tension Release, Nock On Archery
Meditation, Mindset, and Mastery, The Tim Ferriss Show #201
Sam Harris, Ph.D. — How to Master Your Mind, The Tim Ferriss Show #342
Waking Up (Sam Harris’ Meditation App)
10% Happier (Dan Harris’ Meditation App)
Intimacy, Emotional Baggage, Relationship Longevity, and More — Esther Perel, The Tim Ferriss Show #271
Taming Your Temper: The 10-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Anger by Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic
This is Water by David Foster Wallace
Phenotype / Phenotypes, Nature Education
Xenon | Xe, PubChem
Airgas
Praxair
Russian Athletes Admit Xenon Doping at Winter Olympics, Irish Times
World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Prohibited List, USADA
Detection of Epitestosterone Doping by Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry, Clinical Chemistry
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide — Risks, Micro-Dosing, Ibogaine, and More, The Tim Ferriss Show #66
Senna (Documentary)
What Is Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor? (And Why You Should Care), Brainline
How Exercise Beefs Up the Brain, Science
Aerobic vs. Anaerobic: How Do Workouts Change the Body? ISSA
Stability and Strength Training a La Maffetone, Running in Systems
The “Real” Limitless Pill and the Nootropics Boom, Vox
Modafinil: Side Effects, Dosages, Treatment, Interactions, RxList
Matthew Walker, Ph.D., on Sleep – Part I of III: Dangers of Poor Sleep, Alzheimer’s Risk, Mental Health, Memory Consolidation, and More, The Drive #47
Doc Parsley’s Sleep Remedy
Felix Grey
Relax Like A Pro: 5 Steps to Hacking Your Sleep, tim.blog
Phosphorylation, ThermoFisher Scientific
Alaska Bear Eye Mask
chiliPAD
OOLER
Oura Ring
Clase Azul Reposado
Is Sugar Toxic? Peter Attia
High-Fructose Corn Syrup Promotes Colon Tumor Growth in Mice, Weill Cornell Medicine
Dance Scene, Sixteen Candles
Smurfs
The Darwin Awards
Ed Catmull, President of Pixar, on Steve Jobs, Stories, and Lessons Learned, The Tim Ferriss Show #22
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
Freakonomics
Inside The Actor’s Studio
This American Life
Bushnell’s Law, Wikipedia
Meet The Parents
Studying Studies, Peter Attia

SHOW NOTES

Something Peter’s been excited about lately: The concept of Centenarian Olympics. [09:00]
Peter describes one of his favorite exercises for all ages: The goblet squat. [18:12]
How Peter is training with dynamic neuromuscular stabilization (DNS) to correct some of the weightlifting quirks he’s picked up over the years. [21:40]
Why is the ability to control our intra-abdominal pressure — especially as we age — so important? [25:25]
Something Peter has changed his mind about lately: The use of anti-diabetic drug metformin in healthy individuals for enhancing longevity. [27:30]
What are mitochondria, what role do they play in our metabolism, and how could taking metformin — a mitochondrial toxin — possibly be good for us? [31:22]
While certain drugs for certain people under certain conditions can improve and even save lives, never underestimate the power of fasting, exercise, and sleep. [34:51]
What is egg boxing? [37:54]
Something else Peter’s been excited about lately: The space and potency of fasting. We know it’s effective, but how can we scientifically quantify it for greater efficiency and secure the funding to do it? [42:28]
Peter’s current fasting regimen, diet, and supplement intake. [49:42]
Something else Peter has changed his mind about recently: The fate of one’s personality may not actually be set. [54:06]
A stupid and absurd thing Peter likes: Tearing phone books in half. [1:00:44]
Another thing Peter’s been excited about lately: Archery hunting, the consumption of wild game, and a 2021 goal to only eat food that he’s killed. [1:07:35]
What type of gear does Peter use currently? [1:16:31]
In archery, what is the significance of back tension? [1:17:43]
Something else Peter has changed his mind about recently: Childhood experiences that seem minor in the moment can linger long after the fact in unexpected ways — and we, as adults, need to make sure we’re not inadvertently creating negative experiences by behaving badly around the children in our lives (e.g., road raging). [1:21:18]
Tying in with Peter’s acknowledgment of the possibility that personality isn’t fixed in place, how has he managed his own relationship with anger? [1:26:47]
As someone who’s been historically skeptical of therapists, what are the characteristics of a therapist Peter would trust to help him reduce his own suffering? [1:37:00]
Another stupid and absurd thing: Since he was eight years old, Peter has played a game called Forks and Knives. [1:42:26]
Peter’s thoughts on The World Anti-Doping Agency’s efforts to stay ahead of performance-enhancing drugs not yet labeled as such or with restrictions that would be difficult to enforce — like xenon gas and growth hormone. [1:46:04]
Something else Peter’s been excited about lately: Racing cars. [1:51:02]
Something else Peter has changed his mind about recently: The benefits of exercise being much greater than he ever envisioned. But how does he think about type and dose for getting the most out of the effort involved? [1:55:53]
Since taking sleep expert Matt Walker’s advice to heart, how has Peter helped his patients improve their sleep quality, and how has his own sleep protocol changed? [2:00:35]
Another stupid and absurd thing: The What If? game. [2:10:37]
We discuss another game that comes with its own Kevin Rose story: “The How Much Would I Have to Pay You To…” game. How many times in human history has this game been played by women? What’s the worst thing Peter ever agreed to do when he played it in high school? [2:14:39]
Peter and I discuss what we’ve struggled with, enjoyed, and learned in the process of hosting our own podcasts, and what we’ve observed from the interviewing styles of others in the sphere. [2:19:51]
The sometimes intense prep work that goes into an interview, plus pointers for aspiring podcasters eager to get their feet wet before diving in headfirst. [2:31:15]
Parting thoughts. [2:36:53]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

The post Peter Attia, M.D. — Fasting, Metformin, Athletic Performance, and More (#398) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Dr. Peter Attia vs. Tim Ferriss (#352)

Tim Ferriss — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 14:39:41 +0000

“Unhappiness is at the root of more pain, I would suspect, than any ailment that falls in the ‘physical’ body. And to think that we have compounds that could play such an important role that are really facing challenges in getting approved—I just find that really frustrating.” — Dr. Peter Attia

This is a special episode and features one of my dear friends.

A number of guests have started incredible podcasts after being on this show as their first-ever podcast interview, including legendary Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink.

What people don’t know is that Jocko was introduced to me by a fella named Peter Attia.

Dr. Peter Attia (TW: @PeterAttiaMD, IG: @peterattiamd, peterattiamd.com) is a former ultra-endurance athlete (e.g., swimming races of 25 miles), a compulsive self-experimenter, and one of the most fascinating human beings I know. He is one of my go-to doctors for anything performance or longevity-related. He is also easily the best quarterback and sherpa for the US medical system I’ve ever met.

But here is his official bio to do him justice:

Peter is the founder of Attia Medical, PC, a medical practice with offices in San Diego and New York City, focusing on the applied science of longevity.

Peter earned his M.D. from Stanford University and holds a B.Sc. in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics.

In our conversation in this episode, Peter actually interviews me, though he shares a lot of his own experiences. It is audio from Peter’s incredible podcast, The Peter Attia Drive, which can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere podcasts are found. It is one of the few podcasts I listen to regularly.

Many friends I’ve shared this particular episode with have now listened to it multiple times. It takes us both a few minutes to warm up, but then it goes really deep. These are many of the things people like Peter and me aren’t supposed to talk about publicly.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can find the transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

#352: Dr. Peter Attia vs. Tim Ferriss

Want to hear me interviewing Peter? — Listen to our conversation here. In that interview, we discuss optimizing blood testing, drinking “jet fuel,” training for ultra-endurance sports, consuming synthetic ketones, using metabolic chambers, extending longevity by avoiding certain types of exercise, and much more (stream below or right-click here to download):

#50: Dr. Peter Attia on Life-Extension, Drinking Jet Fuel, Ultra-Endurance, Human Foie Gras, and More

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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Peter Attia:

Website | The Peter Attia Drive | Twitter | Instagram

Previous Appearances by Peter Attia on This Show:

Dr. Peter Attia on Life-Extension, Drinking Jet Fuel, Ultra-Endurance, Human Foie Gras, and More, The Tim Ferriss Show Episode 50
Supplements, Blood Tests, and Near-Death Experiences, The Tim Ferriss Show Episode 65)
My Life Extension Pilgrimage to Easter Island, The Tim Ferriss Show Episode 193

Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month by Tim Ferriss, TED 2017
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss
The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Tim Ferriss
The 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat Loss, Incredible Sex and Becoming Superhuman by Tim Ferriss
Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Tim Ferriss
Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World by Tim Ferriss
Michael Pollan — Exploring The New Science of Psychedelics, The Tim Ferriss Show
Are Psychedelic Drugs the Next Medical Breakthrough? — Martin Polanco and Dan Engle on the Tim Ferriss Show
The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide — Risks, Micro-Dosing, Ibogaine, and More — James Fadiman on the Tim Ferriss Show
This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio), fs.blog
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan
Waking Up, Sam Harris meditation app
Awareness Meditation, wikihow.com
Transcendental Meditation
Focused Attention, Open Monitoring and Loving Kindness Meditation: Effects on Attention, Conflict Monitoring, and Creativity — A Review (Lippelt et al., 2014)
Headspace app
Calm app
Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson
The Science of Meditation — A Conversation with Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson, Waking Up Podcast
Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
Help Tim Ferriss Fund Research for the Treatment of Major Depression, crowdrise.com
Council on Spiritual Practices, csp.org
Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance (Griffiths et al., 2006)
Mystical-Type Experiences Occasioned by Psilocybin Mediate the Attribution of Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance 14 Months Later (Griffiths et al., 2008)
Meditation Leads to Reduced Default Mode Network Activity Beyond an Active Task (Garrison et al., 2016)
The Entropic Brain: A Theory of Conscious States Informed by Neuroimaging Research with Psychedelic Drugs (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014)
Psilocybin for Treatment-Resistant Depression: fMRI-Measured Brain Mechanisms (Carhart-Harris et al., 2017)
Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012)
Homological Scaffolds of Brain Functional Networks (Petri et al., 2014)
Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever, The New York Times
Why We’re Donating $5 Million to MAPS by David Bronner
Egg Boxing, peterattiamd.com
Gran Torino, wikipedia
Back Jack Floor Chair
Jack Kornfield — Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy in the Present, The Tim Ferriss Show
The Magic of Mindfulness: Complain Less, Appreciate More, and Live a Better Life, The Tim Ferriss Show
Podcast Gear, The Tim Ferriss Show
How to Build Popular Podcasts and Blogs, The Tim Ferriss Show
Topo Chico
Search Inside Yourself, Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute
Meditation on Loving Kindness by Jack Kornfield
I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression by Terrence Real
Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy by Mo Gawdat
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton
Letters from a Stoic by Lucius Annaeus Seneca or The Tao of Seneca
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

SHOW NOTES

What it’s like living in Austin. [11:54]
The differences between lifespan and health-span. [18:17]
During childhood and adolescence, I believed I was “not designed to be happy.” [20:00]
My TED Talk and close call with suicide. [22:00]
Why I want to focus on discussing different facets of mental health on a first-hand basis. [25:20]
What’s the type of thinking that triggers my downward spirals? [27:36]
Why I changed my focus from investing in startups to investing in mental health. [28:02]
How self-talk can be your best friend or worst enemy. [29:19]
Why I think everyone, including Type A personalities, should try meditation. [32:44]
Why men, in general, are bad at dealing with depression. [40:10]
Peter’s (newly) most-gifted book, which is related to men and depression, and his previous #1 book. [41:36]
The benefits and drawbacks of self-talk. [44:28]
“The need to treat ourselves as well as we treat others. It’s women’s version of the Golden Rule.” — Gloria Steinem [45:53]
How a couple of my podcasts made Peter aware of the effectiveness of plants to treat patients. [46:43]
Peter’s first experience with psilocybin. [49:16]
What started my interest in psychedelics? [49:31]
My transformative experience with ayahuasca. [53:34]
How my experience and research led me to focus on furthering the science of psychedelics and mental health. [1:01:24]
How do we explain the ineffability of psychedelic experiences? [1:04:53]
What is ego dissolution, and how do we explain it? [1:06:10]
What are some of the meditation modalities and meditation apps out there? Why can meditation be so hard to do, but worthwhile to stick with? [1:18:19]
“The consistent program that you follow is better than the perfect program that you quit.” [1:31:16]
Why have I made a big commitment (more than $1 million) to funding scientific research, and to psilocybin and MDMA research in particular? [1:35:22]
The story of Katharine McCormick and the birth control pill, and what a small number of committed people can do to change the course of history. [1:36:35]
Why the FDA granted MDMA-assisted psychotherapy breakthrough therapy designation (which could expedite approval) for the treatment of PTSD, and how a Phase 3 clinical trial is in motion. [1:41:43]
Ibogaine and the treatment of opiate addiction. [1:51:16]
What is the Default Mode Network (DMN), how does it relate to mental health, and how do psychedelic compounds affect the DMN? [1:51:46]

Image credit: Homological Scaffolds of Brain Functional Networks (Petri et al., 2014)

Here’s Michael Pollan explaining the DMN, and the side-by-side images in figure above, in How To Change Your Mind “In a 2014 paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the Imperial College team demonstrated how the usual lines of communications within the brain are radically reorganized when the default mode network goes off-line and the tide of entropy is allowed to rise. Using a scanning technique called magnetoencephalography, which maps electrical activity in the brain, the authors produced a map of the brain’s internal communications during normal waking consciousness and after an injection of psilocybin (shown [above]). In its normal state, shown on the left, the brain’s various networks (here depicted lining the circle, each represented by a different color) talk mostly to themselves, with a relatively few heavily trafficked pathways among them.

“But when the brain operates under the influence of psilocybin, as shown on the right, thousands of new connections form, linking far-flung brain regions that during normal waking consciousness don’t exchange much information. In effect, traffic is rerouted from a relatively small number of interstate highways onto myriad smaller roads linking a great many more destinations. The brain appears to become less specialized and more globally interconnected, with considerably more intercourse, or “cross talk,” among its various neighborhoods.”

How MDMA, in the right setting, may help us “clean up a very messy experience that did a lot of damage; to help people to heal themselves in nonverbal ways. This is really key. It’s very hard for people to talk their way out of something that they didn’t talk their way into.” [1:55:29]
Why has ibogaine gained the least traction in the US for treatment of opiate addiction? [2:01:55]
My first-hand experience with opiate addiction and overdoses. [2:07:26]
Unhappiness may be the single most important problem plaguing our civilization, and there are compounds that may be part of the solution. Is progress being made in terms of pushing through research and application? [2:13:40]
What does it take to reschedule a drug? [2:16:50]
The non-addictive potential of psychedelics. Food vs. cocaine vs. psilocybin. [2:17:43]
Our most recommended and gifted books, and how Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat has jumped into Peter’s #2 spot. [2:23:12]
Was there anything not in Pollan’s book that I would have added? [2:24:27]
How Peter is very proud to be one of the “Biggest Tools” and where people can find Egg Boxing. [2:30:01]
From all the habits and tools that I have learned, what are the three to five things I return to most reliably? [2:31:58]
What advice would I give to my 20- or 30-year-old self? [2:34:28]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

The post Dr. Peter Attia vs. Tim Ferriss (#352) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

My Breakfast Routine Before Workouts

Tim Ferriss — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 15:43:23 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with different breakfast options for decades.

In 1998-1999, it was at least 80% fat while on a Cyclic Ketogenic Diet (CKD). For the last 12 years, I’ve mostly consumed Slow-Carb Diet options shared in The 4-Hour Body (e.g. like this low-carb, high-protein, breakfast you can make in under 3 minutes, though I now use whole eggs).

I occasionally experiment with intermittent fasting, and the video below shares my current super-light breakfast that I use before most training and early morning travel. If hypertrophy (adding muscle) is my main objective, I still default to Slow-Carb and 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking.

Enjoy!

Here are some of the products I mention in this video:

KetoForce
C8 oil (I used Brain Octane in this video)
Tera’s whey
Hydrolyzed gelatin/collagen (Great Lakes)
Super Beets or Beet Elite
Pu-erh tea (here’s one brand I enjoy)
Canned sardines

The post My Breakfast Routine Before Workouts appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Human Foie Gras — A Golden Opportunity

Tim Ferriss — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 03:28:55 +0000

To kick things off, what is foie gras?

It can be explained with a short missive from our friend Wikipedia:

The California foie gras law, California S.B. 1520, is a California State statute that prohibits the “force feed[ing of] a bird for the purpose of enlarging the bird’s liver beyond normal size”…

Former Senator John Burton called foie gras production “an inhumane process that other countries have sensibly banned.”

Given this outrage related to mistreating birds, you might be surprised to learn that human foie gras industries are booming. Children’s livers are apparently particularly tasty. Not unlike veal, I suppose.

I’m putting $50K of my own money into related investments, but we’ll get back to that in a minute. First, some background…

For most of the 20th century, fatty liver and liver cirrhosis had two primary causes: drinking too much alcohol (e.g. Mickey Mantle) or hepatitis B or C (via IV drug use, unhygienic tattooing, tainted blood transfusions, etc.).

But in the last few decades, even infants are showing up with livers that should belong to hardcore alcoholics. And the numbers aren’t small.

It’s estimated that one in ten American children now suffer from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), alongside 40 million affected adults. If you’re an obese Mexican-American boy, the odds are 50-50 (!) that you have NAFLD, thanks to genetic predisposition (PNPLA3 gene).

15 years ago, this disease was unheard of. In 10 years, it’s projected to be the #1 cause of liver transplants. Put another way — In 2001, NAFLD was the reason for 1 out of every 100 liver transplants; by 2010, it was up a ten-fold to 1 in 10; by 2025, assuming nothing stems this tide, there could be five million Americans who need new livers because of it.

Who are driving this trend?

Some point fingers at good folks such as Coca-Cola, juice “cocktail” manufacturers, and the like. Given that many researchers blame fructose, it’s not a huge stretch. Personally, the whole thing makes me sick. I’d like to sic the best scientists in the country on them.

Ah, and this is where the good news comes in.

There is a way, albeit an indirect way, to do this. I implore you to read on and bear with me. This is where it gets exciting.

The NIH alone has spent $155 billion on cancer research since 1972, and cancer survival is up a paltry 3% as a result. The US government spends over $25 billion EACH year on HIV/AIDS. That’s a lot of money.

One might assume fatty liver disease would require similar sums. After all, more American adults have NAFLD than prostate cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, or type 2 diabetes.

That’s the disconnect…and the opportunity to be part of history.

Enter the “Manhattan Project of Nutrition”

The Nutrition Science Initiative—NuSI–has been called the “Manhattan Project of nutrition.” They are run like a lean startup, and I’m proud to be a part of their advisory board.

They don’t take industry money, so they have no interests to protect.

They believe the NAFLD epidemic can be curtailed for a total of $50 million, but the whole domino effect starts with just $1 million. It is a rare day in science when fundamental questions about an epidemic can be answered with such little money (respectively). It’s an incredible Archimedes lever.

For context, NuSI argues that there are dietary triggers of diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and fatty liver disease. To determine what the triggers are, NuSI assembles teams of the best scientists in the country (e.g., from Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, NIH, UCSF, UCSD, Emory, etc.) to fund and execute the kind of research nobody else is willing (or able) to perform.

For NAFLD, NuSI’s team of experts have designed three trials to determine the respective roles of too many calories, too many carbohydrates, and too much sugar–the leading three hypotheses–as dietary triggers.

In early 2015, this team will begin the first ever controlled clinical trial to see if removing sugars from the diet can reverse fatty liver disease in children.

40 kids with NAFLD will be split into two groups, with 20 simply observed on their normal diet as controls, and 20 provided with a diet that’s identical to what they usually eat, but completely devoid of added or refined sugars. The scientists’ hypothesis is that the sugar-free diet will at least stop the progression of NAFLD in these kids, and may even reduce the amount of fat in their livers.

If that’s the case, it’ll be the best evidence we have linking sugar to fatty liver disease.

My $50,000 Challenge…And How to Get Involved

I’m personally matching up to $50,000 for whatever is raised through this blog post, and every donation–big or small–makes a major difference.

[UPDATE: An anonymous donor — a generous reader of this blog — has offered to match up to another $150,000. That means that if you all help donate or contribute just $200,000, another $200,000 will be matched for a total of $400,000!]

Any donation is also a tax write-off, as NuSI is a non-profit organization (of course, speak with your tax advisor). Perfect for end-of-the-year giving.

NuSI is looking to raise $1 million dollars for the first of these three trials—the one that determines how the rest get done. The snowball that starts the avalanche. There are few chances in the world to have this type of impact for this type of money. Could it end up forcing labeling changes, product modifications, obligatory package warnings, policy shifts, and more? I believe so.

Supporting this campaign very easy, and remember–I’m excited to be putting my own skin in this game. I sincerely hope you join me. Every bit counts.

There are three options:

1. Donate by credit or debit card. Visit: http://nusi.org/donate. Enter your donation amount, indicate “NAFLD — Tim Ferriss” in the message field, and click “Donate.” Done.

2. Donate by check. Send your check to: NuSI, attention: Lacey Stenson, 6020 Cornerstone Court W. Suite 240, San Diego, CA 92121. Be sure to write “NAFLD – Tim Ferriss” in the memo line.

3. Donate by transferring securities (stocks, etc.). Email TimFerriss1million@nusi.org [remember the double “r” and double “s”] and they’ll do as much heavy lifting as possible.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for supporting if you’re able. This is a good fight.

If you’d also like to hear a fascinating chat with Peter Attia, MD, co-founder of NuSI, I interview him here on radical sports experimentation, synthetic ketones, meditation, and more. He’s a competitive ultra-endurance athlete, MD, surgeon, and obsessive self-tracker, so we get along great

Ep 50: Dr. Peter Attia on Ultra-Endurance, Drinking Jet Fuel, Human Foie Gras, and More

###

Relevant reading and citations:

Browning JD et al. Prevalence of hepatic steatosis in an urban population in the United States: Impact of ethnicity. Hepatology, 2004.

Welsh JA, Karpen S, Vos MB. Increasing prevalence of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease among United States adolescents, 1988-1994 to 2007-2010. Journal of Pediatrics, 2013.

Targher G, Day CP, Bonora E. Risk of cardiovascular disease in patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. The New England Journal of Medicine, 2010.

Dudekula A et al. Weight loss in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease patients in an ambulatory care setting is largely unsuccessful but correlates with frequency of clinic visits. PLoS One, 2014.

Kawasaki T et al. Rats fed fructose-enriched diets have characteristics of nonalcoholic hepatic steatosis. The Journal of Nutrition, 2009.

Sanchez-Lozada LG et al. Comparison of free fructose and glucose to sucrose in the ability to cause fatty liver. European Journal of Nutrition, 2010.

Best CH et al. Liver damage produced by feeding alcohol or sugar and its prevention by choline. British Medical Journal, 1949.

Ouyang X et al. Fructose consumption as a risk factor for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Journal of Hepatology, 2008.

Abid A et al. Soft drink consumption is associated with fatty liver disease independent of metabolic syndrome. Journal of Hepatology, 2009.

Abdelmalek MF et al. Increased fructose consumption is associated with fibrosis severity in patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Hepatology, 2010.

Assy N et al. Soft drink consumption linked with fatty liver in the absence of traditional risk factors. Canadian Journal of Gastroenterology, 2008.

Stanhope KL et al. Consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2009.

Maersk M et al. Sucrose-sweetened beverages increase fat storage in liver, muscle, and visceral fat depot: a 6-mo randomized intervention study. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2012.

Browning JD et al. Short-term weight loss and hepatic triglyceride reduction: Evidence of a metabolic advantage with dietary carbohydrate restriction. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2011.

Vos MB, Lavine JE. Dietary fructose in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Hepatology, 2013.

Chung M et al. Fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, sucrose, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease or indexes of liver health: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2014.

The post Human Foie Gras — A Golden Opportunity appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Can You Rewire Your Brain In Two Weeks? One Man's Attempt…

Tim Ferriss — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 03:33:25 +0000

Can you rewire your brain in two weeks? The answer appears to be — at least partially — yes.

The following is a guest post by Shane Snow, frequent contributor to Wired and Fast Company and author of the new book SMARTCUTS: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success. Last year, he wrote about his two-week Soylent experiment, which went viral and racked up 500+ comments. He knows how to stir up controversy.

In this post, Shane tests the “brain-sensing headband” called Muse.

It’s received a lot of PR love, but does it stand up to the hype? Can it make you a calmer, more effective person in two weeks? This post tackles these questions and much more.

As many of your know, I’m a long-time experimenter with “smart drugs,” which I think are both more valuable and more dangerous that most people realize. This includes homemade brain stim (tDCS) devices (I wouldn’t recommend without supervision) and other cutting-edge tools. If you’d like to read more on these topics, please let me know in the comments.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Shane’s experimentation!…

Enter Shane Snow

The electrodes needed to be adjusted to fit my sweaty head, which was apparently the largest size the product could accommodate.

I was sitting on a porch in palpable D.C. humidity, on a midsummer’s morning at Bolling Air Force Base, trying to get a quartet of EEG sensors to connect my brain to my Samsung Galaxy. The purple box on my screen kept blinking in and out of sync.

Inside the house, my friend’s two-year-old was jumping violently on the sofa—the same sofa that the shedding 15-pound cat named Endai and I had shared for the past week. The house was in shambles; movers were busily trucking everything away to my friend’s soon-to-be new home in New Mexico. Hence the porch.

I had been sleeping on said couch due to the abrupt ending of an 8-year relationship, which had left me stunned and homeless for the preceding three weeks. As luck would have it, the anti-anxiety pills my shrink had prescribed for me to take “as needed” were back in New York in my friend Simon’s living room. Crap. My calendar had just alerted me that I’d missed the Skype call start time for my company board meeting, right before the movers unplugged the Internet. Meanwhile, a platoon of military helicopters had decided to play what appeared to be a game of “who can hover the longest over the neighborhood”. Chuk, chuk, chuk, chuk, chuk. CHUCK. CHUCK.

My stress levels were high.

Seemed like as good a time as any to try out my new gadget: a brainwave-sensing headband called the Muse, and its companion app, Calm.

I placed the band’s centimeter-wide contact strip of electrodes against my forehead and rested the plastic against the top of my ears, fiddling with the fit until my phone finally registered a solid connection for each of the sensors, two on my temples, two behind my ears. I donned my white Audio-Technica DJ headphones and fired up the app, which in a soothing voice instructed me to sit up straight, and breeeeeeeathe.

Calm is a simple meditation exercise: Count your breaths. Don’t try to force them. Your body knows how to breathe. Simply pay attention, the female voice in my headphones told me. After Muse calibrated to my brain’s “active” state—by making me brainstorm items in a series of topics—I was given five minutes of nature sounds to breathe to. When calm and focused, I enjoyed the sound of lapping waves and birds tweeting; when my mind wandered, sturdy winds picked up and the birds flew away.

At the end of five minutes, the app confirmed: I am not very calm.

Thus began my two week experiment in brain therapy. I’d been planning on acquiring a Muse after having caught wind of its development nearly two years before, but who knew it would finally be released during the most anxious time of my adult life? Two weeks was plenty of time, Muse inventor Ariel Garten told me, for the Muse focus training exercises “to reduce perception of pain, improve memory, improve affect, reduce anxiety, and also improve emotional intelligence.”

Seemed a little good to be true, but I was willing to test it.

Electroencephalography (EEG—the recording of electrical activity emitted from the brain) has come a long way in the last 100 years, since doctors drilled holes in monkeys heads to attach sensors, and eventually glued contacts with cathode ray tubes to intact human skulls to map brain activity. They discovered that the brain emits oscillating signals of variable frequency, and the frequency of the oscillations indicates what’s happening—at a high level—in one’s mind. These “waves” are generally delineated into categories based on frequency ranges:

Delta waves: indicate deep sleep. (1-3 Hz)
Theta waves: indicate deep relaxation or meditation. (4-8 Hz)
Alpha waves: indicate a relaxed brain state, what Garten calls “an open state of mind.” (9-13 Hz)
Beta waves: indicate alert consciousness and fire up when you’re actively thinking. (14-30 Hz)
Gamma waves: indicate high alertness and are often associated with learning. (30-100 Hz)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The original purpose of EEG was the study of epilepsy. Over the decades, however, as computers improved, neuroscientists’ increasing capability to process the enormous amount of data the brain throws off allowed them to experiment with EEG for other uses, such as attention therapy.

In his 2007 book, The Brain That Changes Itself, neuroscientist Norman Doidge made mainstream the then recent (and surprising) finding that “the brain can change its own structure and function through thought and activity.” Our intelligence and tendencies are not locked in once we’re no longer children, as popular belief once held. Once our brain was wired, it could still be rewired. Doidge called it, “the most important alteration in our view of the brain since we first sketched out its basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron.”

This adaptability factor of the brain is called “neuroplasticity.” You may have seen dubious advertisements for “brain-enhancing games” and other gimmicks that drop the term neuroplasticity in impressive-sounding (but often meaningless) marketing speak. Despite this misuse, the plasticity of our neurons is, in fact, fact. Our brains use it to wire themselves naturally, but in the past several years scientists have developed a simple procedure to “hack” them.

Neurofeedback training, or NFT as the scientists call it, is a conditioning method wherein a patient is hooked up to an EEG and shown how active her brain is, thus allowing her to concentrate on exercises that exploit neuroplasticity to build mental muscles that allow her to consciously affect her resting brain activity. Clinical studies have shown that NFT helps the majority of patients to improve their cognitive control and have also helped ADHD sufferers significantly improve their ability to focus. NFT has even been shown to have a positive effect on depression.

The two prerequisites to being able to pull off NFT are EEG sensors and a computer processor that can turn an EEG scan into real-time feedback. The electricity coming off the brain is orders of magnitude weaker than a standard AA battery, which means sensors must be powerful, delicate, and well-attached to pick anything up. Doctors have found that the skull reduces the signal significantly and thus would prefer if we didn’t have skulls (for examination purposes, that is), but have mostly settled on using wet sensors—electrodes affixed to the scalp or forehead using conductive gel.

The breakthrough that enabled a more practical, portable EEG device like the Muse claims to be, was the advent of dry sensors, or metal contacts that can use the skin’s own moisture or sweat to attain the necessary conductivity.

“Brain waves are very, very, very quiet. They’ve had to make their way all the way through your thick, thick skull,” Garten says. But sensor technology is improving at a rate that indicates we’re two to three years away from non-contact sensors, she predicts.

And in 2014, processing power is no longer a problem. “Ten years ago we were using fiber optic cable to make sure that you got this extraordinary data into what was like an egg carton and an ancient Commodore computer so that they could do all the processing,” Garten says. “Now, we can just use a phone and Bluetooth.”

The 2013 Muse prototype

When I’d first laid hands on the Muse a year and a half before, it was a chunky slab of plastic and metal. Garten and I met up at a design gallery in Manhattan for a demo of the prototype headband she’d been working on for the better part of the last decade. A Canadian fashion designer turned neuroscientist, she spoke earnestly about the potential applications for measuring one’s brainstate to ameliorate stress and perhaps one day cure ADHD and anxiety.

Garten’s prototype Muse measured the activity of these waves and output them to an iPad like a seismograph. After I donned the plastic headband, I watched in real time as slowing my breathing or concentrating on something or simply talking affected the different wave forms.

“The long term vision is this tool is going to be a regular part of our daily lives,” Garten told me. “You know, like pedometers that help people manage and understand their physical exercise. Brain health is going to be something that is on everybody’s mind. Up until now, there has been no way to, basically, like put a stethoscope up to your brain and say, ‘How is it doing?’”

Ten years ago, a NFT system with Muse-like capabilities (often found in a chiropractor’s office) would cost 5 figures and a closet-worth of space. Now the processing power lives on a standard smartphone, and Muse sensors cost $299.

Eventually, Garten predicted, doctors would actively use it to treat the mentally ill. Programmers would build brainwave-control apps for gaming and smart homes and surfing the Internet on top of Muse’s technology.

But for now it just gives you tweety birds.

My porch session resulted in precisely zero of them:

This session, for which I got a score of “31% calm,” would be the first of many mental workouts in my DYI NFT experiment. Would regular usage of the Muse headband actually change my brain and help fix my anxious life? Or would it turn out to be another wearable that’s more hype than help?

THE EXPERIMENT

The 2014 Muse headband

The hypothesis (aka sales pitch) was that by using Muse, I’d improve my ability to focus and maintain my cool during my stressful day-to-day.

So for fifteen days, I performed a five-minute Muse Calm session each morning within an hour of waking up and shaking off sleep. I’d sit in a similar setting (straight-back chair in a room alone), in similar clothing (comfortable, shorts and t-shirt, no shoes), with no distractions (accomplished via Bose noise-canceling earbuds) every time.

Additionally, I performed a series of sessions in various random non-comfortable settings, to test whether different mental exercises produced different results, or whether I could remain calm while being assaulted by various outside forces—which is the real goal of NFT, rather than simply getting better at a “game” in quiet isolation.

Though the app would tell me if my brain was getting better at calming itself during the exercise, the less easy-to-quantify result would be to see whether my level of general anxiety would decrease as I got better at the Calm app. (I.e. am I forming these alleged neural pathways?) Garten and Calm each told me that once I completed enough sessions (5,000 points’ worth), the app would unlock insights about how my brain was doing, which could shed some light on my meta-state. But I also tracked my overall emotional and mental state by keeping regular journal entries throughout the two weeks.

For a control—and as a basic BS test—I performed a session while reading a book instead of doing the breathing exercise. I read three pages of Murakami’s new one, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, and my brain was all sorts of active. Mr. Murakami, your work is stimulating. Science hath proven it:

THE RESULTS

Most of my morning sessions took place between 8 and 11 a.m. I keep a somewhat irregular sleep schedule (a source of anxiety, or symptom?), but aim for 7 hours a night. The important part for this experiment was to make sure that I did my Muse session within an hour of waking, but after I had stopped being groggy. In other words: before my morning exercise, after my morning pee.

I kept the morning schedule up with a few exceptions: on August 18, the Muse Calm app caused the headband to think my brainwaves had completely flatlined. I contacted the Muse team, and they confirmed that this was indeed a bug that they were working on fixing that day. On August 20, 22, 24, and 26 I skipped my morning session due to extenuating circumstances. (The 24th, for example, was my birthday, and I stayed out until 8 a.m.. My first session that day was at 4 p.m. and resulted in a hangover-level 31%.) But throughout my 15-day experiment, I never went a day without doing one or more sessions, and I never went two days without doing a standardized morning session.

In all, I completed 24 sessions. Here’s how my morning sessions went over the course of the two weeks:

You’ll notice that I did pretty poorly for the first several sessions, then experienced a jump in improvement on August 17. What this chart doesn’t show is that though it was that August 17 was actually the seventh session I’d done in total. So I was getting better, but I’m not entirely sure why such a dramatic jump. You’ll also notice a slight dip on the 25th and 27th. On these days, I was having a couple of particularly anxious mornings (due to personal issues); however, on these days I still maintained double the calm as my first few sessions—which were less emotionally fraught than these days.

My final morning session of the experiment, on August 28, was a serene 89%—my best yet, and just one spike of brain activity away from monk-like zen:

More importantly, I attracted a fucking flock of tweety birds:

Here’s how I performed on my random sessions in less-controlled environments:

Clearly, it was harder for me to focus and remain calm when I was tired or emotionally compromised.

Trains made it easier to focus (likely due to the lack of noise and abundance of leg room). Airplanes tend to give me claustrophobia, but it’s also likely that the vibrations of the plane itself caused my muscles to move (generating louder electrical signals than your brain emits) and made my results so poor during the flight. There certainly was a lot of shaking going on during my flight.

Interestingly, listening to calming music (I tend to put Blackmill’s “Miracle” album on repeat when I want to relax or single-task) outperformed no sound (simply trying to calm myself without an aid). On August 27, my regular session with the app’s wind and waves, resulted in 12% less calm than my music experiment immediately after.

As far as the meta, “how am I doing” portion of the experiment went, I eagerly awaited when I could unlock the “Insights About You” page of the app, after racking up enough “calm points”. Disappointingly, though Garten and Muse Calm both promised me these “additional features and special insights into my brain”, once I unlocked the screen, I got simply a blank, broken page:

When asked, the Muse publicist confirmed that the feature “actually hasn’t been developed yet” and relayed the (in my opinion) unlikely explanation that “there was a miscommunication between the product and dev teams.”

My journal entries indicated a general decrease in agitation and worry by the end of the experiment. My ability to focus on tasks (primarily writing) seemed to improve. I have a tendency to get distracted when I’m writing, and in the same way that the waves-and-wind exercise in the app teaches you to power through distractions and focus on your breath, I felt that I already was improving my ability to notice a distraction but keep it in the background instead of indulging it.

Furthermore, as I walked down busy streets or lay in bed—times when I normally would ruminate—I found myself subconsciously slowing breaths and counting them as a means of shoving out bad thoughts and calming down.

“Many smart people who use their brains a lot are ‘high beta,’” explained my therapist (whose name I’ll omit to maintain a shred of personal privacy) when I asked her about this. An award-winning Manhattan psychologist and author, she has used NFT herself. A few years ago, she used a professional-grade version of Muse to teach her own active brain to be silent. “I couldn’t go to sleep without the TV on,” she said. “The minute it was quiet, my brain would explode with activity.”

With measurement and some mental situps, she calmed her own rumination—as apparently thousands of people have done at clinics that use EEG therapy. That “neuroplasticity” thing that people throw around, it turns out, is real. And it works as fast as one can form a bad habit.

“The brain can be retrained,” she said. “People think it can’t, but it can.”

POTENTIAL ISSUES

One of the main limitations of the Muse Calm app—or at least questions that I had from the beginning—was the validity of the wind-and-waves feedback sound system itself, as well as the “count your breaths” mediation exercise. My assistant, Erin, who’s a yoga instructor and meditation expert by night, was skeptical that the Muse Calm exercise was the most effective method the app could have chosen. Why would you have the distracting sounds get worse when you were most compromised? she said. Doesn’t that create a self-defeating cycle?

Garten responded: “We did a bunch of experimentation on positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement and we ultimately built an application with a mix of both. The negative reinforcements of the wind can definitely be distracting, but what you learn over time is also this lesson in not being judgmental when things don’t work.”

A 2010 study by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown found positive links between “mindfulness training”—the popular meditation practice of calmly noticing, but not changing what’s happening to you—has a positive effect on working memory. The Muse Calm’s “notice and count your breaths” exercise is a form of mindfulness training, and appears to hold up under scientific scrutiny, but the wind-and-waves feedback loop (NFT) throws a bit of a wrench into true “mindfulness”, since the act of being mindful ends up affecting your environment, whereas the point of mindfulness meditation is to notice but not affect.

Could a “pure” mindfulness exercise without the instant and self-reinforcing feedback outperform Calm’s NFT/mindfulness hybrid? Beats me, but it’s a question I’d want to test in future experiments.

Other limitations or potential variables that could affect the science behind my two-week experiment include the following:

Factors such as the exact time I awoke and what kind of bed I slept in changed slightly from day to day, as I was traveling and couch-hopping. While the course of my experiment showed an upward trend in calm, I wasn’t able to duplicate the time and setting of each of my morning sessions precisely, which could affect the results to some degree.
Since I was dealing with the fresh personal trauma, perhaps I was naturally recovering psychologically during the two weeks of my experiment (i.e. regression to the mean). My therapist insists that the relationship wound was too fresh and two weeks is not enough time to work through anything, but it still could be a factor.
This experiment was only two weeks, which I was told would be a sufficient minimum for results. More time could certainly help verify the trends I observed in my short experiment. (And I plan to keep using Muse over the next few months to track just that.)
And of course, my observations about how I was feeling were, by nature, subjective. (However, if my psychological improvement is all in my head, that’s okay by me—it was in my head to begin with! And actually, I’ve interviewed one scientist who’s studying how placebos actually form neural pathways that can physically cure psychological issues. Very interesting stuff happening in this field.)

EPILOGUE

The electrodes had no problem beaming the signal from my sweaty head to my Android this time.

I was sitting on a set of red bleachers in disgusting New York humidity in the middle of Times Square, Manhattan. The familiar female voice in my headphones instructed me to close my eyes, as she had two dozen times before.

Around me, a trillion stressed-out tourists were busily taking selfies and worrying about pick pockets. A troupe of Chinese activists had just accosted me with pamphlets and signs concerning some “Jesuit Father discrimination” something-or-other, meanwhile a quartet of feather-headressed ladies performed a synchronized dance on the steps below me. A bumblefoot pigeon had taken up residence on my step and didn’t seem to want to leave me alone. My entire body was sweating.

I’d just walked through my old neighborhood, a surprisingly painful reminiscence. Unexpectedly, one of my ex’s favorite songs had begun playing on shuffle as I made my way through the crowd, further dampening my mood. In the back of my head were the several overdue stories for editors of various publications in line with my book launch, and the approximately 200 priority emails stacked up in my inbox. I was lugging my entire life in an overstuffed backpack and had just spilled protein drink all over my shorts—which I just now realized were my only available leggings, because I’d left the remaining two pairs of jeans I owned back in my friend Simon’s freezer (here’s why). I was pensive and hot and frustrated and dripping.

Once again, I donned my brainwave headband, which once again told me to breeaaathe.

About halfway through my five-minute session—the twenty-fifth I’d undertaken since meeting Muse—some nearby tourists began singing “Happy Birthday” so loudly that I could hear them through my noise-canceling headphones. A fire engine blared its siren in place for a full minute, stuck one block away in Times Square traffic. My butt burned on the red steps, in the August heat. My posture was killing me.

At the end of five minutes, Muse confirmed: I was pretty damn calm.

The two spikes in active brain activity in this chart were the fire truck and the birthday party, each of which I recovered from almost instantly. Aside from that, my brain state was either neutral or calm the entire time:

Plus I attracted 15 tweety birds:

Despite the chaos in my life, there was no doubt that this little device had made me a calmer person in just two weeks. I could play through the mental and physical pain with twice the composure as just fifteen days before.

Muse has a way to go before the guy with the electric headband on in Times Square doesn’t just look like an idiot. And the Calm app could definitely use work. (Different meditation exercises, please?) However, the science behind what the Muse team is doing is real, the technology promising, and a bevy of independent programmers are already building fascinating applications on top of Muse.

With the development of cheap and portable EEG monitors like Muse, are we a few lines of code away from controlling light switches and video games with our brains? It’ll take a while.

But I, at least, am a step closer to mind over matter.

Breeeeathe….

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Question of the day: What do you think are the next frontiers of self-experimentation and self-tracking? What would you like me to test for you? Please let me know in the comments by clicking here.

The post Can You Rewire Your Brain In Two Weeks? One Man's Attempt… appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Truth About "Homeopathic" Medicine (#23)

Tim Ferriss — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 04:43:24 +0000

Homeopathy — effective, useless, or dangerous? (Photo: Marcos Zerene)

[Audio version]

The Truth About "Homeopathic" Medicine (#23)

[Text version]

(You can find the full transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.)

I routinely use an arnica gel for minor muscular strains. In fact, it’s one of my “go to” treatments.

In 2010, however, I found myself swallowing Boiron Arnica Montana 30C pellets, an oral version that was the only option at the closest GNC. I started at five pellets, SIX times a day–TWICE the recommended dose. Risk of overdose? Not likely.

“30C,” which I looked up that evening, tells you all you need to know.

This consumable version of arnica, unlike the creams I’d used in the past, was a homeopathic remedy. Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, pioneered the field of homeopathy in 1796, if the term “pioneer” can be applied to alternative “medicine” founded on concepts like mass dilution and beatings with horse-hair implements. From the Wikipedia entry for “homeopathic dilutions,” last I looked:

Homeopaths use a process called “dynamisation” or “potentisation” whereby a substance is diluted with alcohol or distilled water and then vigorously shaken by ten hard strikes against an elastic body in a process called “succussion”… Hahnemann believed that the process of succussion activated the vital energy of the diluted substance.

Riiiight.

Back to 30C. 30C indicates a 10^-60 (10^(-60), or 10 to the negative 60th) dilution, the dilution most recommended by Hahnemann.

30C would require giving 2 billion doses per second to 6 billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any one person. Put another way, if I diluted one-third of a drop of liquid into all the water on earth, it would produce a remedy with a concentration of about 13C, more than twice the “strength” of our 30C arnica.

Most homeopathic remedies in liquid are indistinguishable from water and don’t contain a single molecule of active medicine. In systematic review after systematic review, these dilutive homeopathic remedies display no ability to heal beyond placebo.

I found this particularly bothersome. Bothersome because I appeared to heal faster using oral 30C arnica.

There are a few potential explanations…

OPTION #1 — HOMEOPATHIC REMEDIES WORK AS ADVERTISED

The water actually retains some “essential property” of the original substance because of the beatings and shakings. I give this a probability of somewhere between zero and epsilon (where epsilon is almost zero). It violates the most basic laws of science and makes my head hurt.

NOTE: Some people use the term “homeopathic” interchangeably with “organic” or “herbal”; I am not addressing this misnomer nor the associated compounds. Some herbal, non-prescription medications have tremendous effects. I’m speaking only to the original use of the word “homeopathic” as related to dilutive treatments.

OPTION #2 — THE PLACEBO EFFECT

I didn’t realize it was a homeopathic remedy until after four or five doses, and I had been told it could reduce pain by up to 50% in 24 hours. Placebo is strong stuff. People can become intoxicated from alcohol placebos, and “placebo” knee surgeries for osteoarthritis, where incisions are made but nothing is repaired, can produce results that rival the real deal. This explanation gets my vote. Now, if I could just forget what I read on the label, I could repeat it next time.

OPTION #3 — REGRESSION TOWARD THE MEAN

Imagine you catch a cold or get the flu. It’s going to get worse and worse, then better and better until you are back to normal. The severity of symptoms, as is true with many injuries, will probably look something like a bell curve.

The bottom flat line, representing normalcy, is the mean. When are you most likely to try the quackiest shit you can get your hands on? That miracle duck extract Aunt Susie swears by? The crystals your roommate uses to open his heart chakra? Naturally, when your symptoms are the worst and nothing seems to help. This is the very top of the bell curve, at the peak of the roller coaster before you head back down. Naturally heading back down is regression toward the mean.

If you are a fallible human, as we all are, you might misattribute getting better to the duck extract, but it was just coincidental timing.

The body had healed itself, as could be predicted from the bell curve–like timeline of symptoms. Mistaking correlation for causation is very common, even among smart people.

In the world of “big data,” this mistake will become even more common, particularly if researchers seek to “let the data speak for themselves” rather than test hypotheses.

Spurious connections galore–that’s what the data will say, among other things. Caveat emptor.

OPTION #4 — SOME UNEXPLAINED MECHANISM

‘Tis possible that there is some as-yet-unexplained mechanism through which homeopathy works. Some mechanism that science will eventually explain. Stranger things have happened.

And while we don’t need to know how something works if we observe it to work (which clinical trials have not, in this case)…

Until something even remotely plausible comes along, I’ll do my best to scratch my psora (an itch “miasm” that Hahnemann felt caused epilepsy, cancer, and deafness) with at least one molecule of active substance.

###

Do you agree or disagree? Do you have evidence to the contrary? Please share your thoughts in the comments by clicking here.

This is something that has bothered me for years, but I’m very open to being proven wrong.

For more material like this article, check out:

The 4-Hour Body

How to Keep Feces Out of Your Bloodstream (or Lose 10 Pounds in 14 Days)

Gout: The Missing Chapter and Explanation

The post The Truth About "Homeopathic" Medicine (#23) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Are Saunas the Next Big Performance-Enhancing "Drug"?

Tim Ferriss — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 21:20:44 +0000

Preface by Editor

This post will explain how heat can be used to increase growth hormone, muscular hypertrophy, endurance, and otherwise aid performance.

It’s authored by Rhonda Perciavalle Patrick, Ph.D, and it’s comprehensive. But before we get started, you need to read some background and warnings…

Heat is no joke.

Ever since I was a premie, overheating and thermo-regulation have been my arch-enemies. On a few occasions, I’ve been hospitalized for heat stroke symptoms, and the symptoms hit suddenly and without warning. I’m extremely lucky I didn’t smash my skull on the ground after the collapses.

To delve into this handicap, I even became a test subject at Stanford University in 2005.

I underwent military-related heat marches to exhaustion, capturing data the entire time. Here are some choice pics.

It was as fun as it looks (I’ll share videos another time, as they’re hilarious):

After each session, I was so incapacitated that I couldn’t do any work for 8-12 hours. I often had to simply go home and sleep, even at 11am. These issues led me to eventually leave the study.

Heat is serious fucking business, m’kay?

People can die from excessive heat (sauna example here, recent running death here), so read these warnings carefully…

TIM’S DISCLAIMER ON THIS POST:

Please don’t be stupid and kill yourself. It would make us both quite unhappy. Consult a doctor before doing anything described in this post or on this blog.

BIGGER LAWYER DISCLAIMER:

The material on this blog is for informational purposes only. As each individual situation is unique, you should use proper discretion, in consultation with a health care practitioner, before undertaking the protocols, diet, exercises, techniques, training methods, or otherwise described herein. The author and publisher expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects that may result from the use or application of the information contained herein.

OK, will all that out of the way, here we go.

Consider looking at this piece as what elite athletes are likely to augment to their training and drug regimens.

The following is a guest article by Rhonda Perciavalle Patrick, Ph.D., who works with Dr. Bruce Ames of the Ames carcinogenicity test, the 23rd most-cited scientist in all fields between 1973 and 1984. Dr. Patrick also conducts clinical trials, performed aging research at Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and did graduate research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where she focused on cancer, mitochondrial metabolism, and apoptosis.

Enjoy!

And if you have any experiences with using heat, cold, or other environmental factors to improve performance; or if you’ve suffered from them; I’d love to hear about it all in the comments. Ditto for any factual corrections.

Enter Rhonda

For the most part, people don’t like to get hot.

The massive indoor climate control systems and pleasantly chilled water fountains found in most gyms speak to this fact. There are some exceptions — Bikram yoga, for example — but they’re few and far between.

But here’s the surprise: increasing your core temperature for short bursts is not only healthful, it can also dramatically improve performance.

This is true whether it’s done in conjunction with your existing workout or as an entirely separate activity. I’m going to explain how heat acclimation through sauna use (and likely any other non-aerobic activity that increases core body temperature) can promote physiological adaptations that result in increased endurance, easier acquisition of muscle mass, and a general increased capacity for stress tolerance. I will refer to this concept of deliberately acclimating yourself to heat, independent of working out, as “hyperthermic conditioning.”

I’m also going to explain the positive effects of heat acclimation on the brain, including the growth of new brain cells, improvement in focus, learning and memory, and ameliorating depression and anxiety. In addition, you’ll learn how modulation of core temperature might even be largely responsible for “runner’s high” via an interaction between the dynorphin/beta-endorphin opioid systems.

The Effects of Heat Acclimation on Endurance

If you’ve ever run long distances or exercised for endurance, it’s intuitive that increased body temperature will ultimately induce strain, attenuate your endurance performance, and accelerating exhaustion. What might not be as intuitive is this: acclimating yourself to heat independent of aerobic physical activity through sauna use induces adaptations that reduce the later strain of your primary aerobic activity.

Hyperthermic conditioning improves your performance during endurance training activities by causing adaptations, such as improved cardiovascular and thermoregulatory mechanisms (I will explain what these mean) that reduce the negative effects associated with elevations in core body temperature. This helps optimize your body for subsequent exposures to heat (from metabolic activities) during your next big race or even your next workout.

Just a few of the physiological adaptations that occur are:

Improved cardiovascular mechanisms and lower heart rate. ¹
Lower core body temperature during workload (surprise!)
Higher sweat rate and sweat sensitivity as a function of increased thermoregulatory control. ²
Increased blood flow to skeletal muscle (known as muscle perfusion) and other tissues.²
Reduced rate of glycogen depletion due to improved muscle perfusion. ³
Increased red blood cell count (likely via erythropoietin). ⁴
Increased efficiency of oxygen transport to muscles.⁴

Hyperthermic conditioning optimizes blood flow to the heart, skeletal muscles, skin, and other tissues because it increases plasma volume. This leads to endurance enhancements in your next workout or race, when your core body temperature is once again elevated.

Being heat acclimated enhances endurance by the following mechanisms…

It increases plasma volume and blood flow to the heart (stroke volume).^2, ⁵ This results in reduced cardiovascular strain and lowers the heart rate for the same given workload.² These cardiovascular improvements have been shown to enhance endurance in both highly trained and untrained athletes.^2,5, ⁶
It increases blood flow to the skeletal muscles, keeping them fueled with glucose, esterified fatty acids, and oxygen while removing by-products of the metabolic process such as lactic acid. The increased delivery of nutrients to muscles reduces their dependence on glycogen stores. Endurance athletes often hit a “wall” (or “bonk”) when they have depleted their muscle glycogen stores. Hyperthermic conditioning has been shown to reduce muscle glycogen use by 40%-50% compared to before heat acclimation.^3, ⁷ This is presumably due to the increased blood flow to the muscles.³ In addition, lactate accumulation in blood and muscle during exercise is reduced after heat acclimation.⁵
It improves thermoregulatory control, which operates by activating the sympathetic nervous system and increasing the blood flow to the skin and, thus the sweat rate. This dissipates some of the core body heat. After acclimation, sweating occurs at a lower core temperature and the sweat rate is maintained for a longer period.²

So what sort of gains can you anticipate?

One study demonstrated that a 30-minute sauna session two times a week for three weeks POST-workout increased the time that it took for study participants to run until exhaustion by 32% compared to baseline.⁴

The 32% increase in running endurance found in this particular study was accompanied by a 7.1% increase in plasma volume and 3.5% increase in red blood cell (RBC) count.⁴ This increased red blood cell count accompanying these performance gains feed right back into those more general mechanisms we talked about earlier, the most obvious of which being: more red blood cells increase oxygen delivery to muscles. It is thought that heat acclimation boosts the RBC count through erythropoietin (EPO) because the body is trying to compensate for the corresponding rise in plasma volume.⁴

(Note from Tim: If “EPO” sounds familiar, it’s because it’s commonly injected by Tour de France competitors. More on that here.)

In other words, hyperthermic conditioning through sauna use doesn’t just make you better at dealing with heat; it makes you better, period. I do want to mention that while these gains were made with a small sample size (N=6) some of the later studies that I point out reinforce this conclusion.

The Effects of Hyperthermic Conditioning on Muscle Hypertrophy (Growth)

Exercise can induce muscular hypertrophy. Heat induces muscular hypertrophy. Both of these together synergize to induce hyper-hypertrophy.

Here are a few of the basics of how muscle hypertrophy works: muscle hypertrophy involves both the increase in the size of muscle cells and, perhaps unsurprisingly, an accompanying increase in strength. Skeletal muscle cells do contain stem cells that are able to increase the number of muscle cells (TIM: called “hyperplasia”) but hypertrophy instead generally involves an increase in size rather than number.

So what determines whether your muscle cells are growing or shrinking (atrophying)?

A shift in the protein synthesis-to-degradation ratio…and an applied workload on the muscle tissue (of course). That’s it.

At any given time your muscles are performing a balancing act between NEW protein synthesis and degradation of existing proteins. The important thing is your net protein synthesis, and not strictly the amount of new protein synthesis occurring. Protein degradation occurs both during muscle use and disuse. This is where hyperthermic conditioning shines: heat acclimation reduces the amount of protein degradation occurring and as a result it increases net protein synthesis and, thus muscle hypertrophy. Hyperthermic conditioning is known to increase muscle hypertrophy by increasing net protein synthesis through three important mechanisms:

Induction of heat shock proteins. ⁸ ⁹
Robust induction of growth hormone.¹
Improved insulin sensitivity. ¹⁰

Exercise induces both protein synthesis and degradation in skeletal muscles but, again, it is the net protein synthesis that causes the actual hypertrophy. When you exercise, you are increasing the workload on the skeletal muscle and, thus, the energetic needs of your muscle cells. The mitochondria found in each of these cells kick into gear in order to help meet this demand and start sucking in the oxygen found in your blood in order to produce new energy in the form of ATP. This process is called oxidative phosphorylation. A by-product of this process, however, is the generation of oxygen free radicals like superoxide and hydrogen peroxide, which is more generally referred to simply as “oxidative stress”.

Heat Stress Triggers Heat Shock Proteins That Prevent Protein Degradation

Oxidative stress is a major source of protein degradation.

For this reason, any means of preventing exercise-induced oxidative protein damage and/or repairing damaged proteins, while keeping the exercise induced protein synthesis, will ultimately cause a net increase of protein synthesis and therefore will be anabolic.

Heat shock proteins (or HSPs), as the name implies, are induced by heat and are a prime example of hormesis. Intermittent exposure to heat induces a hormetic response (a protective stress response), which promotes the expression of a gene called heat shock factor 1 and subsequently HSPs involved in stress resistance.

HSPs can prevent damage by directly scavenging free radicals and also by supporting cellular antioxidant capacity through its effects on maintaining glutathione.^8,9
HSPs can repair misfolded, damaged proteins thereby ensuring proteins have their proper structure and function.^8,9

Okay, let’s take a step back from the underlying mechanisms and look at the big picture of heat acclimation in the context of increasing muscle hypertrophy:

It has been shown that a 30-minute intermittent hyperthermic treatment at 41°C (105.8°F) in rats induced a robust expression of heat shock proteins (including HSP32, HSP25, and HSP72) in muscle and, importantly, this correlated with 30% more muscle regrowth than a control group during the seven days subsequent to a week of immobilization.⁸ This HSP induction from a 30-minute intermittent hyperthermic exposure can persist for up to 48 hours after heat shock.^8,9 Heat acclimation actually causes a higher basal (such as when not exercising) expression of HSPs and a more robust induction upon elevation in core body temperature (such as during exercise). ¹¹ ¹² ¹³ This is a great example of how a person can theoretically use hyperthermic conditioning to increase their own heat shock proteins and thereby reap the rewards.

Heat Stress Triggers A Massive Release of Growth Hormone

Another way in which hyperthermic conditioning can be used to increase anabolism is through a massive induction of growth hormone. ¹⁴ ¹⁵, ¹ Many of the anabolic effects of growth hormone are primarily mediated by IGF-1, which is synthesized (mainly in the liver but also in skeletal muscle and other tissues) in response to growth hormone. There are two important mechanisms by which IGF-1 promotes the growth of skeletal muscle:

It Increases protein synthesis via activation of the mTOR pathway. ¹⁶
It decreases protein degradation via inhibition of the FOXO pathway.¹⁶

Mice that have been engineered to express high levels of IGF-1 in their muscle develop skeletal muscle hypertrophy, can combat age-related muscle atrophy, and retained the same regenerative capacity as young muscle. ¹⁷^, ¹⁸ In humans, it has been shown that the major anabolic effects of growth hormone in skeletal muscle may be due to inhibition of muscle protein degradation (anti-catabolic), thereby increasing net protein synthesis.¹⁶ In fact, growth hormone administration to endurance athletes for four weeks has been shown to decrease muscle protein oxidation (a biomarker for oxidative stress) and degradation by 50%. ¹⁹

My point is good news. You don’t need to take exogenous growth hormone. Sauna use can cause a robust release in growth hormone, which varies according to time, temperature, and frequency.^1,15

For example, two 20-minute sauna sessions at 80°C (176°F) separated by a 30-minute cooling period elevated growth hormone levels two-fold over baseline.^1,15 Whereas, two 15-minute sauna sessions at 100°C (212°F) dry heat separated by a 30-minute cooling period resulted in a five-fold increase in growth hormone.^1,15 However, what’s perhaps more amazing is that repeated exposure to whole-body, intermittent hyperthermia (hyperthermic conditioning) through sauna use has an even more profound effect on boosting growth hormone immediately afterward: two one-hour sauna sessions a day at 80°C (176°F) dry heat (okay, this is a bit extreme) for 7 days was shown to increase growth hormone by 16-fold on the third day.¹⁴ The growth hormone effects generally persist for a couple of hours post-sauna.¹ It is also important to note that when hyperthermia and exercise are combined, they induce a synergistic increase in growth hormone. ²⁰

Increased Insulin Sensitivity

Insulin is an endocrine hormone that primarily regulates glucose homeostasis, particularly by promoting the uptake of glucose into muscle and adipose tissue. In addition, insulin also plays a role in protein metabolism, albeit to a lesser degree than IGF-1. Insulin regulates protein metabolism in skeletal muscle by the two following mechanisms:

It increases protein synthesis by stimulating the uptake of amino acids (particularly BCAAs) into skeletal muscle. ²¹
It decreases protein degradation through inhibition of the proteasome, which is a protein complex inside cells that is largely responsible for the degradation of most cellular proteins. ²²

In humans, there is more evidence indicating that the major anabolic effects of insulin on skeletal muscle are due to its inhibitory action on protein degradation.

For example, insulin infusion in healthy humans, which increased insulin to normal physiological postprandial (after a meal) levels, suppressed muscle protein breakdown without significant affecting muscle protein synthesis. ²³^{, 21} In contrast, insulin deficiency (such as in type 1 diabetes mellitus) and insulin resistance (to a lesser extent) are both associated with increased skeletal muscle breakdown.^22, ²⁴

For this reason, hyperthermic conditioning may also lend itself to promoting muscle growth by improving insulin sensitivity and decreasing muscle protein catabolism. Intermittent hyperthermia has been demonstrated to reduce insulin resistance in an obese diabetic mouse model. Insulin resistant diabetic mice were subjected to 30 minutes of hyperthermic treatment, three times a week for twelve weeks. This resulted in a 31% decrease in insulin levels and a significant reduction in blood glucose levels, suggesting re-sensitization to insulin.¹⁰ The hyperthermic treatment specifically targeted the skeletal muscle by increasing the expression of a type of transporter known as GLUT 4, which is responsible for the transporting of glucose into skeletal muscle from the bloodstream. Decreased glucose uptake by skeletal muscle is one of the mechanisms that leads to insulin resistance.

(TIM: For more fun with GLUT 4 transporters, read the “Damage Control” chapter in The 4-Hour Body, which covers how to minimize (or eliminate) fat gain from cheat meals or cheat days.)

Relevance for Muscle Injury

Animal studies using rats have shown that a 30-minute and 60-minute hyperthermic treatment at 41°C (105.8°F) attenuates hindlimb muscle atrophy during disuse by 20% and 32%, respectively.^9, ²⁵ In order to return to a hypertrophic state after injury, muscle regrowth (“reloading”) must occur. Muscle reloading, while important for hypertrophy, induces oxidative stress particularly after periods of disuse, which slows the rate of muscle regrowth. A 30-minute hyperthermic treatment at 41°C (105.8°F) increased soleus muscle regrowth by 30% after reloading as compared to non-hyperthermic treatment in rats.⁸ The effects of whole body hyperthermia on preventing muscle atrophy and increasing muscle regrowth after immobilization were shown to occur as a consequence of elevated HSP levels.^8,9,25

During injury, you may be immobilized but you don’t have to be very mobile to sit in the sauna a few times a week to boost your HSPs! This is a clear win in the injury and recovery department. Remember, hyperthermic conditioning (from sauna use) results in an elevation in HSP levels under normal conditions and leads to an even greater boost during exercise (or when core body temperature is elevated).^11-13

Relevance for Rhabdomyolysis

Hyperthermic conditioning may also be able to protect against rhabdomyolysis (muscle breakdown due to severe muscle overuse) through the induction of HSP32 also known as heme oxygenase 1. ²⁶, ²⁷

Rhabdomyolysis releases myoglobin, a byproduct from broken down muscle tissue, into the bloodstream, which can cause kidney failure. (TIM: CrossFitters, watch your CPK levels after glute-ham ab work. If you can’t do long planks with your feet against a wall, don’t do hyper-extended ROM, ballistic ab work.)

Since myoglobin is a heme-containing protein, HSP32 (heme oxygenase 1) can rapidly degrade myoglobin before it has toxic effects on the kidney.^26,27 In fact, induction of HSP32 in rats has been shown to protect against rhabdomyolysis in rats.²⁶ This function of HSP32 is very different than the classical role of HSPs in preventing protein degradation. Again, heat acclimation causes a higher basal expression of HSPs and a more robust expression upon heat stress.^11-13 The more heat acclimated your body is (the pre-conditioning is the key here), the higher your HSP32 expression will be during physical activity and this will protect your kidneys from the toxic myoglobin breakdown product.

That’s a sweet deal.

Longevity

In flies and worms, a brief exposure to heat treatment has been shown to increase their lifespan by up to 15% and it’s been shown that this effect is specifically mediated by HSPs. ²⁸^, ²⁹^, ³⁰

While studying the effects of something like hyperthermic conditioning on longevity is inherently hard in humans (obviously), there have been some preliminary positive associations with variations in the HSP70 gene associated with increased expression and longevity. ³¹

Effects of Heat Stress on The Brain

One of the ways that the brain responds to injury on the cellular level is increased HSP production.

This includes ischemic injury (i.e. stroke), traumatic injury, and excitotoxicity (epileptic). ³² What complicates things, however, in the context of “hyperthermic conditioning” (or deliberate heat acclimation) is that while on the one hand hyperthermia has been shown to reduce the frequency of seizures and the damage they cause post-conditioning, hyperthermia can actually increase the damage caused by seizures if they occur during a period of heat stress. In other words, the stress and its damaging effects are additive. ³³ ³⁴

That (and it’s implicit warning) being said, sauna-induced hyperthermia has been shown to induce a robust activation of the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

One study demonstrated that men that stayed in the sauna that was heated to 80°C (176°F) until subjective exhaustion increased norepinephrine by 310%, had a 10-fold increase in prolactin, and actually modestly decreased cortisol.^1,15 Similarly, in another study, women that spent 20-minute sessions in a dry sauna twice a week had a 86% increase in norepinephrine and a 510% increase in prolactin after the session. ³⁵

Norepinephrine helps with focus and attention while prolactin promotes myelin growth, which makes your brain function faster, which is key in repairing nerve cell damage. ³⁶³⁷

In addition to increasing norepinephrine, heat acclimation has actually been shown to increase biological capacity to store norepinephrine for later release. ³⁸ In light of the fact that the norepinephrine response to exercise has been demonstrated to be blunted in children with ADHD and that norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (NRI) are frequently prescribed to treat ADHD (among other things), use of heat stress and subsequent acclimation should be tested for it’s effectiveness as an interesting alternative therapeutic approach. ³⁹

Neurogenesis

Heat stress has been shown to increase the expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) more than exercise alone when used in conjunction with exercise. ⁴⁰

This is important because BDNF increases the growth of new brain cells as well as the survival of existing neurons. An increase in neurogenesis is thought to be responsible for enhancing learning. ⁴¹ BDNF’s role in the brain is also to modulate neuronal plasticity and long-term memory, while also having been shown to ameliorate anxiety and depression from early-life stressful events. ⁴² In addition to the function BDNF plays in the brain when it’s released as a consequence of exercise, BDNF is also secreted by muscle where it plays a role in muscle repair and the growth of new muscle cells. ⁴³

While BDNF has specifically been shown to play some role in relieving depression from stressful early-life events, whole-body hyperthermia has also been demonstrated to improve depression in cancer patients. ⁴⁴ In this particular study, however, it was speculated that beta-endorphin (which is also induced by hyperthermia), not BDNF, may have been the agent responsible for this effect. As an aside, one of the reasons whole-body hyperthermia is sometimes used with cancer patients is because it can enhance the effects of chemotherapeutic agents. ⁴⁵

The Runner’s High and The Role of Dynorphin

Ever wonder what is responsible for the “runner’s high” or post-exercise highs, in general? You’ve probably heard that it’s due to endorphins, but that’s not the whole story.

Beta-endorphins are endogenous (natural) opioids that are a part of the body’s natural painkiller system, known as the mu opioid system, which block pain messages from spreading from the body to the brain in a process called antinociception. What is lesser known is that the body also produces a peptide known as dynorphin (a “kappa opioid”), which is generally responsible for the sensation of dysphoria. The discomfort experienced during intense exercise, exposure to extreme heat (such as in a sauna), or eating spicy food (capsaicin) is due to the release of dynorphin. The release of dynorphin causes an upregulation and sensitization of mu opioid receptors, which interact with beta-endorphin. ⁴⁶ This process is what underlies the “runner’s high” and is directly precipitated by the discomfort of physical exercise. Translation: the greater the discomfort experienced during your workout or sauna, the better the endorphin high will be afterward. Now you understand the underlying biological mechanism that explains this.

How is this relevant to hyperthermic conditioning and sauna use?

Heat stress from heat exposure in a dry sauna has been demonstrated to cause a potent increase in beta-endorphin levels, even more than exercise alone.^1,15

A study in rats explains this somewhat: dynorphin delivered directly into a part of the hypothalamus in the brains of rats triggers a drop in their body temperature, while blocking dynorphin with an antagonist was shown to prevent this same response. Similarly, mu receptor agonists have been shown to induce increases in body temperature in rats. ⁴⁷ What this seems to imply is that perhaps, by deliberately manipulating your body temperature you are actually directly engaging the mu (endorphin) and kappa opioid (dynorphin) systems since they clearly play a role in temperature regulation in general.

In Conclusion

To recap and drive the point home: acclimating your body to heat stress by intermittent whole-body hyperthermia via sauna use (“hyperthermic conditioning”) has been shown to:

Enhance endurance by:

Increasing nutrient delivery to muscles thereby reducing the depletion of glycogen stores.
Reducing heart rate and reducing core temperature during workload.

Increase muscle hypertrophy by preventing protein degradation through the following three means:

Induction of heat shock proteins and a hormetic response (which has also been shown to increase longevity in lower organisms).
Cause a massive release of growth hormone.
Improving insulin sensitivity.

Hyperthermic conditioning also has robust positive effects on the brain:

Increases the storage and release of norepinephrine, which improves attention and focus.
Increases prolactin, which causes your brain to function faster by enhancing myelination and helps to repair damaged neurons.
Increases BDNF, which causes the growth of new brain cells, improves the ability for you to retain new information, and ameliorates certain types of depression and anxiety.
Causes a robust increase in dynorphin, which results in your body becoming more sensitive to the ensuing endorphins.

Life is stressful.

When you exercise, you are forcing your body to become more resilient to stress (somewhat paradoxically) through stress itself.

Hyperthermic conditioning is a novel and possibly effective tool that can improve your resistance to the sort of stress associated with fitness pursuits as well as some that are not traditionally associated with fitness such as the protective effects of HSPs on various types of stress. That being said, deliberately applied physical stress, whether heat stress or ordinary exercise, is something that requires caution.

You shouldn’t avoid it altogether, but you should use good common sense, not overwhelm yourself, and make sure to know your limits. (NOTE: you should not drink alcohol before or during sauna use as it increases the risk of death). ⁴⁸ Personal variation probably comes into play when finding your own sweet spot for building thermal tolerance while avoiding over-extending yourself.

I believe that hyperthermic conditioning in general may be worth a closer look as a tool in the toolbox of athletes. Perhaps it can be used for much more than just relaxation?

But no matter how enthusiastic you might be, remember:

Heat responsibly and with someone else, never alone.
Never heat yourself while drunk, and friends don’t let friends sauna drunk.
If you are pregnant or have any medical condition, saunas are not for you. Speak with your doctor before starting this or any regimen involving physical stressors.

Be careful, ladies and gents.

###

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Rhonda Patrick

You can find more video and writing from Dr. Rhonda Patrick at her website, FoundMyFitness.com.

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Ricardo J. S. Costa, M. J. C., Jonathan P. Moore & Neil P. Walsh. Heat acclimation responses of an ultra-endurance running group preparing for hot desert-based competition. European Journal of Sport Science, 1-11 (2011). The sample sizes in both studies referenced here and in #4 have small sample sizes but they are two independent studies that compliment each other. This study also reinforces the endurance enhancements in #5.
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Michael N. Sawka, C. B. W., Kent B. Pandolf. Thermoregulatory Responses to Acute Exercise-Heat Stress and Heat Acclimation. Handbook of Physiology, Environmental Physiology (2011). This is a good review article that covers many of the mechanisms that underly the endurance enhancements as a consequence of heat acclimation.
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Selsby, J. T. et al. Intermittent hyperthermia enhances skeletal muscle regrowth and attenuates oxidative damage following reloading. J Appl Physiol (1985) 102, 1702-1707, doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.00722.2006 (2007). This is an important paper because it shows that intermittent hyperthermia can enhance the regrowth of skeletal muscle in rats after disuse via induction of heat shock proteins. Having a quantitative way to non-invasively measure muscle mass in humans is difficult. Even though the experiment was done in rats (N=40) this is a good study because it also shows mechanism.
Naito, H. et al. Heat stress attenuates skeletal muscle atrophy in hindlimb-unweighted rats. J Appl Physiol 88, 359-363 (2000). This study demonstrates that HSP induction by intermittent hyperthermia in rats can prevent muscle atrophy during muscle disuse. Again, this study was in rats but it shows mechanism has has a good sample size (N=40).
Kokura, S. et al. Whole body hyperthermia improves obesity-induced insulin resistance in diabetic mice. International journal of hyperthermia : the official journal of European Society for Hyperthermic Oncology, North American Hyperthermia Group 23, 259-265, doi:10.1080/02656730601176824 (2007). This study was done in mice (N=20) but it demonstrates a very important mechanistic finding that hyperthermia increases the expression of glucose transporters in skeletal muscle, thus improving insulin sensitivity. Exercise (which elevates core body temp.) is known to improve insulin sensitivity. This is a cool mechanism by which this can occur.
Yamada, P. M., Amorim, F. T., Moseley, P., Robergs, R. & Schneider, S. M. Effect of heat acclimation on heat shock protein 72 and interleukin-10 in humans. J Appl Physiol (1985) 103, 1196-1204, doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.00242.2007 (2007). This study includes a relatively small human sample size (N=12) but it is a very important because it demonstrates that heat acclimation causes a higher induction of heat shock proteins upon later exercise. This is the fundamental concept behind hyperthermic conditioning.
Moseley, P. L. Heat shock proteins and heat adaptation of the whole organism. J Appl Physiol (1985) 83, 1413-1417 (1997). This is a review article that explains some of the functions of HSPs and reinforces the data from reference #11 demonstrating that heat acclimation can increase the expression of HSPs.
Kuennen, M. et al. Thermotolerance and heat acclimation may share a common mechanism in humans. American journal of physiology. Regulatory, integrative and comparative physiology 301, R524-533, doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00039.2011 (2011). This study is another small human sample size (N=8) but it reinforces the data from ref #11 because it demonstrates that some of the positive effects of heat acclimation are due to increased expression of HSPs. The study even shows specificity here by administering an HSP inhibitor, which ameliorates the positive effects of heat acclimation.
Leppaluoto, J. et al. Endocrine effects of repeated sauna bathing. Acta physiologica Scandinavica 128, 467-470, doi:10.1111/j.1748-1716.1986.tb08000.x (1986). This is a very important study because it shows the profound hormonal responses to repeated sauna use in humans (N=17). By day 3, growth hormone increased 16-fold, highlighting the importance of hyperthermic conditioning.
Kukkonen-Harjula, K. et al. Haemodynamic and hormonal responses to heat exposure in a Finnish sauna bath. European journal of applied physiology and occupational physiology 58, 543-550 (1989). Even though the human sample size in this study is small (N=8), it shows that varying temperatures and durations differentially affect hormones. Small sample or not, the fundamental chemical changes in this study are reinforced from the data referenced in #1 and #4.
Velloso, C. P. Regulation of muscle mass by growth hormone and IGF-I. British journal of pharmacology 154, 557-568, doi:10.1038/bjp.2008.153 (2008).
Coleman, M. E. et al. Myogenic vector expression of insulin-like growth factor I stimulates muscle cell differentiation and myofiber hypertrophy in transgenic mice. The Journal of biological chemistry 270, 12109-12116 (1995). In this study mice were engineered to constitutively express high levels of human IGF-1 in their muscle stem cells. This caused the proliferation and differentiation of myoblasts and caused muscle hypertrophy.
Barton, E. R., Morris, L., Musaro, A., Rosenthal, N. & Sweeney, H. L. Muscle-specific expression of insulin-like growth factor I counters muscle decline in mdx mice. The Journal of cell biology 157, 137-148, doi:10.1083/jcb.200108071 (2002).
Healy, M. L. et al. High dose growth hormone exerts an anabolic effect at rest and during exercise in endurance-trained athletes. The Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism 88, 5221-5226 (2003).
Ftaiti, F. et al. Effect of hyperthermia and physical activity on circulating growth hormone. Applied physiology, nutrition, and metabolism = Physiologie appliquee, nutrition et metabolisme 33, 880-887, doi:10.1139/H08-073 (2008). This study shows that hyperthermia SYNERGIZES with exercise to increase growth hormone levels in humans. So you can feel the burn from your routine and then jump immediately in the sauna for amplified effects. Again, small sample (N=8) but its conclusion is logical and intuitively follows the other studies. Anything that substantially increases core temperature should increase growth hormone and the effects should potentiate each other.
Louard, R. J., Fryburg, D. A., Gelfand, R. A. & Barrett, E. J. Insulin sensitivity of protein and glucose metabolism in human forearm skeletal muscle. The Journal of clinical investigation 90, 2348-2354, doi:10.1172/JCI116124 (1992). This study demonstrated that insulin stimulated BCAA uptake in the forearm (post-absorptive and insulin infusion) The sample size in this human study was good (N=39).
Lecker, S. H., Goldberg, A. L. & Mitch, W. E. Protein degradation by the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway in normal and disease states. Journal of the American Society of Nephrology : JASN 17, 1807-1819, doi:10.1681/ASN.2006010083 (2006). This is a review article that covers the mechanism by which insulin decreases protein degradation: proteasome inhibition.
Chow, L. S. et al. Mechanism of insulin’s anabolic effect on muscle: measurements of muscle protein synthesis and breakdown using aminoacyl-tRNA and other surrogate measures. American journal of physiology. Endocrinology and metabolism 291, E729-736, doi:10.1152/ajpendo.00003.2006 (2006). This study used multiple different methods to measure protein synthesis and degradation in 18 humans after insulin infusion. The insulin levels were raised to physiologically relevant postprandial levels.
Guillet, C., Masgrau, A., Walrand, S. & Boirie, Y. Impaired protein metabolism: interlinks between obesity, insulin resistance and inflammation. Obesity reviews : an official journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity 13 Suppl 2, 51-57, doi:10.1111/j.1467-789X.2012.01037.x (2012).
Selsby, J. T. & Dodd, S. L. Heat treatment reduces oxidative stress and protects muscle mass during immobilization. American journal of physiology. Regulatory, integrative and comparative physiology 289, R134-139, doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00497.2004 (2005). This study just reinforces and compliments the protective effect that HSPs have on muscle mass during disuse. It reinforces data referenced in #9.
Nath, K. A. et al. Induction of heme oxygenase is a rapid, protective response in rhabdomyolysis in the rat. The Journal of clinical investigation 90, 267-270, doi:10.1172/JCI115847 (1992). This reference is relevant to the mechanism by which hyperthermic conditioning may protect against rhabdomyolysis: induction of HSP32.
Wei, Q., Hill, W. D., Su, Y., Huang, S. & Dong, Z. Heme oxygenase-1 induction contributes to renoprotection by G-CSF during rhabdomyolysis-associated acute kidney injury. American journal of physiology. Renal physiology 301, F162-170, doi:10.1152/ajprenal.00438.2010 (2011).
Khazaeli, A. A., Tatar, M., Pletcher, S. D. & Curtsinger, J. W. Heat-induced longevity extension in Drosophila. I. Heat treatment, mortality, and thermotolerance. The journals of gerontology. Series A, Biological sciences and medical sciences 52, B48-52 (1997). This reference, as well as the two immediate ones following, back up the notion that heat shock extends lifespan in lower organisms via HSP induction.
Lithgow, G. J., White, T. M., Melov, S. & Johnson, T. E. Thermotolerance and extended life-span conferred by single-gene mutations and induced by thermal stress. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 92, 7540-7544 (1995).
Tatar, M., Khazaeli, A. A. & Curtsinger, J. W. Chaperoning extended life. Nature 390, 30, doi:10.1038/36237 (1997).
Singh, R. et al. Anti-inflammatory heat shock protein 70 genes are positively associated with human survival. Current pharmaceutical design 16, 796-801 (2010). This study was a longitudinal cohort of a Denmark population (N=168) that found a slight increase in longevity (1 year) in females that had a polymorphism in the HSP70 gene that was associated with increased HSP expression upon heat stress.
Yenari, M. A., Giffard, R. G., Sapolsky, R. M. & Steinberg, G. K. The neuroprotective potential of heat shock protein 70 (HSP70). Molecular medicine today 5, 525-531 (1999).
Duveau, V., Arthaud, S., Serre, H., Rougier, A. & Le Gal La Salle, G. Transient hyperthermia protects against subsequent seizures and epilepsy-induced cell damage in the rat. Neurobiology of disease 19, 142-149, doi:10.1016/j.nbd.2004.11.011 (2005).
Lundgren, J., Smith, M. L., Blennow, G. & Siesjo, B. K. Hyperthermia aggravates and hypothermia ameliorates epileptic brain damage. Experimental brain research. Experimentelle Hirnforschung. Experimentation cerebrale 99, 43-55 (1994).
Laatikainen, T., Salminen, K., Kohvakka, A. & Pettersson, J. Response of plasma endorphins, prolactin and catecholamines in women to intense heat in a sauna. European journal of applied physiology and occupational physiology 57, 98-102 (1988). This study reinforces ref #15 in terms of the norepinephrine response but this demonstrates it in women. Also, the smaple size is small (N=11), so it good to have multiple studies showing similar effects.
Salbaum, J. M. et al. Chlorotoxin-mediated disinhibition of noradrenergic locus coeruleus neurons using a conditional transgenic approach. Brain research 1016, 20-32, doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2004.03.078 (2004).
Gregg, C. et al. White matter plasticity and enhanced remyelination in the maternal CNS. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 27, 1812-1823, doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4441-06.2007 (2007).
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Wigal, S. B. et al. Catecholamine response to exercise in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Pediatric research 53, 756-761, doi:10.1203/01.PDR.0000061750.71168.23 (2003).
Goekint, M., Roelands, B., Heyman, E., Njemini, R. & Meeusen, R. Influence of citalopram and environmental temperature on exercise-induced changes in BDNF. Neuroscience letters 494, 150-154, doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2011.03.001 (2011). This study had an N=8 (okay, tiny) but… it demonstrated that hyperthermia and exercise synergize to elevate BDNF. This is awesome. Who doesn’t want more BDNF?
van Praag, H., Christie, B. R., Sejnowski, T. J. & Gage, F. H. Running enhances neurogenesis, learning, and long-term potentiation in mice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 96, 13427-13431 (1999).
Maniam, J. & Morris, M. J. Voluntary exercise and palatable high-fat diet both improve behavioural profile and stress responses in male rats exposed to early life stress: role of hippocampus. Psychoneuroendocrinology 35, 1553-1564, doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2010.05.012 (2010).
Pedersen, B. K. Muscle as a Secretory Organ. Comprhensive Physiology (2013).
Koltyn, K. F., Robins, H. I., Schmitt, C. L., Cohen, J. D. & Morgan, W. P. Changes in mood state following whole-body hyperthermia. International journal of hyperthermia : the official journal of European Society for Hyperthermic Oncology, North American Hyperthermia Group 8, 305-307 (1992).
Liu, X. L. et al. [Therapeutic effect of whole body hyperthermia combined with chemotherapy in patients with advanced cancer]. Zhong nan da xue xue bao. Yi xue ban = Journal of Central South University. Medical sciences 31, 350-352 (2006).
Narita, M. et al. Heterologous mu-opioid receptor adaptation by repeated stimulation of kappa-opioid receptor: up-regulation of G-protein activation and antinociception. Journal of neurochemistry 85, 1171-1179 (2003). This study was done in mice but shows that repeated activation of kappa opioid receptor causes mu opioid receptor to become more sensitive to beta-endorphin. This study provides a mechanism by which the dysphoric feeling from exercise or heat stress can ultimately result in a better “endorphin high.”
Xin, L., Geller, E. B. & Adler, M. W. Body temperature and analgesic effects of selective mu and kappa opioid receptor agonists microdialyzed into rat brain. The Journal of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics 281, 499-507 (1997).
Heckmann, J. G., Rauch, C., Seidler, S., Dutsch, M. & Kasper, B. Sauna stroke syndrome. Journal of stroke and cerebrovascular diseases : the official journal of National Stroke Association 14, 138-139, doi:10.1016/j.jstrokecerebrovasdis.2005.01.006 (2005). This reference is only an N=1 where a a man had consumed several glasses of wine before he got in the sauna and was, subsequently, found dead. Alcohol consumption while in the sauna can cause severe dehydration, hypotension, arrhthymia, and embolic stroke. This is also reviewed in reference #1

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Potential Tactics for Defeating Cancer — A Toolkit in 1,000 Words

Tim Ferriss — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 05:53:56 +0000

(Photo: Irina Souiki)

I’ve wanted to publish this post for years.

It will propose a few simple approaches for minimizing the occurrence of cancer.

With 19 billion capillaries in our bodies, on average, virtually 100% of us have microscopic cancers by the time we’re 70 years old, more than 40% of us by age 40. There’s a good chance you have pinhead-size cancers in your body right now. These “cancers without disease” aren’t typically a problem, as they can’t grow larger than 0.5 mm without a blood supply.

But if cancer cells get constant blood and glucose? That’s when you can end up dead.

That’s not where I want to be, and it’s not where I want you to be.

A Little Backstory…

While at the annual TED Conference in 2010, I learned that two close friends had been diagnosed with cancer. The year before, another friend had died of pancreatic cancer in his early 30’s.

This all made me furious and sad. It also made me feel helpless.

As luck would have it, TED in 2010 was abuzz about someone named Dr. William Li. His 24-minute presentation had introduced the crowd to “anti-angiogenesis therapy”: in plain English, how to starve cancers of blood. Dr. Li specializes in inhibiting cancer-specific blood-vessel growth, which ostensibly keeps abnormal growth in check. The simplest “drug” he recommended was tea. Drinking a daily blend of white tea (specifically Dragon Pearl jasmine) and green tea (Japanese sencha).

I started drinking the cocktail immediately, but it was just a first step…

In clinical trials, you see, anti-angiogenesis has been largely been unsuccessful. The father of the field, Judah Folkman, was brilliant, but his brainchild (Avastin) has been a disappointment. For about $100,000 a year of Avastin, one might extend lifespan by a month or so.

So, while I kept drinking my tea, I realized it probably wasn’t enough by itself. That said, it pointed me to new research.

I, for one, believe there are systemic causes of cancer with systemic treatments. This belief began with metformin experimentation in college (not recommended without doctor supervision), followed by reading the work and references of Gary Taubes, all of which has been reinforced by conversations with oncologists over the last decade.

All trails have led back to blood and glucose.

It’s also important to realize that killing cancer cells isn’t hard. Doctors have known how to do this for 100+ years. The real questions is: how do you exploit a weakness in cancer that is NOT a weakness in normal cells? Killing cancer is easy. Killing cancer while not killing non-cancer has proven almost impossible.

The below guest post is written by Peter Attia, M.D.. It explores a simple theory of cancer growth, which simultaneously shows how you can minimize it.

Peter is the President of the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI). Peter spent five years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital as a general surgery resident, where he was the recipient of several prestigious awards and the author of a comprehensive review of general surgery. Peter also spent two years at the National Institutes of Health as a surgical oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute under Dr. Steve Rosenberg, where his research focused on the role of regulatory T cells in cancer regression and other immune-based therapies for cancer. Peter earned his M.D. from Stanford University and holds a B.Sc. in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

This post is designed to allow you to skim…or go deep. Here are the options:

The quickie (10-15 min) – Read the post but ignore footnotes. Definitely a good start if you’re in a rush.
The weekend warrior (30 minutes) – Read the post and footnotes, which provide an excellent intro to the science.
The semi-pro (60 minutes) – Read the post, footnotes, and at least one top-10 suggested articles. This will give you more of a plan and put you ahead of 90% of the people who discuss cancer.

Enter Pete

One night Tim and I were having dinner and the topic of cancer came up.

Personally and professionally, I have a great interest in cancer, so when Tim asked if I could write something about cancer that was: (i) interesting to a broad audience, (ii) not technically over the top, (iii) not my typical 5,000 word dissertation, (iv) yet nuanced enough for his readers, I agreed to give it a shot, in about 1,000 words.

(Before reading this post, you may find some value in first reading a previous post which sets up the context for this one.)

So here it is, in roughly 1,000 words…

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In 1924 a scientist named Otto Warburg happened upon a counterintuitive finding.

Cancer ¹ cells, even in the presence of sufficient oxygen, underwent a type of metabolism ² cells reserved for rapid energy demand – anaerobic metabolism ³. In fact, even when cancer cells were given additional oxygen, they still defaulted into using only glucose ⁴ to make ATP ⁵ via the anaerobic pathway. This is counterintuitive because this way of making ATP is typically a last resort for cells, not a default, due to the relatively poor yield of ATP.

This observation begs a logical question: Do cancer cells do this because it’s all they can do? Or do they deliberately ‘choose’ to do this?

The first place to look is at the mitochondria ⁶ of the cancer cells. Though not uniformly the case, many cancers do indeed appear to have defects in their mitochondria that prevent them from carrying out oxidative phosphorylation ⁷.

Explanation 1

Cancer cells, like any cells undergoing constant proliferation (recall: cancer cells don’t stop proliferating when told to do so), may be optimizing for something other than energy generation. They may be optimizing for abundant access to cellular building blocks necessary to support near-endless growth. In this scenario, a cancer would prefer to rapidly shuttle glucose through itself. In the process, it generates the energy it needs, but more importantly, it gains access to lots of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms (from the breakdown of glucose). The atoms serve as the necessary input to the rate-limiting step of their survival — growth. The selection of cancer cells is based on this ability to preferentially grow by accessing as much cellular substrate as possible.

Explanation 2

Cells become cancerous because they undergo some form of genetic insult. This insult – damage to their DNA ⁸ – has been shown to result in the turning off of some genes ⁹ (those that suppress tumor growth) and/or the activation of other genes (those that promote cell growth unresponsive to normal cell-signaling). Among other things, this damage to their DNA also damages their mitochondria, rendering cancer cells unable to carry out oxidative phosphorylation. So, to survive they must undergo anaerobic metabolism to make ATP.

Whichever of these is more accurate (a discussion beyond my word count), the end result appears the same – cancer cells almost exclusively utilize glucose to make ATP without the use of their mitochondria. The point is: cancer cells have a metabolic quirk. Regardless of how much oxygen and fatty acid ¹⁰ they have access to, they preferentially use glucose to make ATP, and they do it without their mitochondria and oxygen.

So, can this be exploited to treat or even prevent cancer?

One way this quirk has been exploited for many years is in medical imaging. FDG-PET scans ¹¹ are a useful tool for non-invasively detecting cancer in people. By exploiting the obligate glucose consumption of cancer cells, the FDG-PET scan is a powerful way to locate cancer (see figure).

You can probably tell where I’m leading you. What happens if we reduce the amount of glucose in the body? Could such an intervention ‘starve’ cancer cells? An insight into this came relatively recently from an unlikely place – the study of patients with type 2 diabetes.

In the past few years, three retrospective studies of patients taking a drug called metformin have shown that diabetic patients who take metformin, even when adjusted for other factors such as body weight and other medications, appear to get less cancer.

And when they do get cancer, they appear to survive longer. Why? The answer may lie in what metformin does. Metformin does many things, to be clear, but chief among them is activating an enzyme called AMP kinase, which is important in suppressing the production of glucose in the liver (the liver manufactures glucose from protein and glycerol and releases it to the rest of the body). This drug is used in patients with diabetes to reduce glucose levels and thereby reduce insulin requirement.

So, the patients taking metformin may have better cancer outcomes because their glucose levels were lower, or because such patients needed less insulin. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) also appear to play an integral role in cancer growth as recently demonstrated by the observation that people with defective IGF-1 receptors appear immune to cancer. Or, it may be that activation of AMP kinase in cancer cells harms them in some other way. We don’t actually know why, but we do know that where there is smoke there is often fire. And the ‘smoke’ in this case is that a relatively innocuous drug that alters glucose levels in the body appears to interfere with cancer.

This may also explain why most animal models show that caloric restriction improves cancer outcomes. Though historically, this observation has been interpreted through the lens of less ‘food’ for cancer. A more likely explanation is that caloric restriction is often synonymous with glucose reduction, and it may be the glucose restriction per se that is keeping the cancer at bay.

Fortunately this paradigm shift in oncology – exploiting the metabolic abnormality of cancer cells – is gaining traction, and doing so with many leaders in the field.

Over a dozen clinical trials are underway right now investigating this strategy in the cancers that appear most sensitive to this metabolic effect – breast, endometrial, cervical, prostate, pancreatic, colon, and others. Some of these trials are simply trying to reproduce the metformin effect in a prospective, blinded fashion. Other trials are looking at sophisticated ways to target cancer by exploiting this metabolic abnormality, such as targeting PI3K ¹² directly.

To date, no studies in humans are evaluating the therapeutic efficacy of glucose and/or insulin reduction via diet, though I suspect that will change in the coming year or two, pending outcomes of the metformin trials.

EDITOR’S NOTE:Though it might seem premature to some, let’s make this actionable. To reduce glucose, consider following a diet (way of eating, really) such as The Slow-Carb Diet, Paleo, or any diet that induces ketosis. Many of the most influential researchers in the US, in addition to following ketogenic diets, take slow-acting metformin as a preemptive measure. NOTE: This should NOT be done without medical supervision.

Influences

I’ve been absurdly blessed to study this topic at the feet of legends, and to be crystal clear, not a single thought represented here is original work emanating from my brain. I’m simply trying to reconstruct the story and make it more accessible to a broader audience. Though I trained in oncology, my research at NIH/NCI focused on the role of the immune system in combating cancer. My education in the metabolism of cancer has been formed by the writings of those below, and from frequent discussions with a subset of them who have been more than generous with their time, especially Lewis Cantley (who led the team that discovered PI3K) and Dominic D’Agostino.

• Otto Warburg

• Lewis Cantley

• Dominic D’Agostino

• Craig Thompson

• Thomas Seyfried

• Eugene Fine

• Richard Feinman (not to be confused with Richard Feynman)

• Rainer Klement

• Reuben Shaw

• Matthew Vander Heiden

• Valter Longo

Afterword by Tim

It’s my hope that this short article offers hope. Moreover, it’s intended to offer actionable directions for those dealing with cancer or fearful of it.

Note a few things:

I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on the Internet. Make medical decisions with medical supervision.
This is a 1,000-word primer and therefore simplified. It’s not incorrect, but it is not comprehensive either, as it would impossible to digest for most people. Be sure to read the “further reading” above if you’re serious.

Have you stumbled upon any novel science/treatments related to cancer? Please share in the comments below, if so, as I’d love this post to become a living resource.

Many thanks for reading this far.

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Footnotes:

A collection of cells in our bodies that grow at roughly normal speeds, but that do not respond appropriately to cell signaling. In other words, while a collection of ‘normal’ cells will grow and stop growing in response to appropriate messages from hormones and signals, cancer cells have lost this property. Contrary to popular misconception, cancers cells do not grow especially fast relative to non-cancer cells. The problem is they don’t ‘know’ when to stop growing.
The process of converting the stored energy in food (chemical energy contained mostly within the bonds of carbon and hydrogen atoms) into usable energy for the body to carry out essential and non-essential work (e.g., ion transport, muscle contraction).
The process of converting the stored energy in food (chemical energy contained mostly within the bonds of carbon and hydrogen atoms) into usable energy for the body to carry out essential and non-essential work (e.g., ion transport, muscle contraction).
A very simple sugar which many carbohydrates ultimately get broken down into via digestion; glucose is a ring of 6-carbon molecules and has the potential to deliver a lot, or a little, ATP, depending on how it is metabolized.
Adenosine triphosphate, the ‘currency’ of energy used by the body. As its name suggests, this molecule has three (tri) phosphates. Energy is liberated for use when the body converts ATP to ADP (adenosine diphosphate), by cutting off one of the phosphate ions in exchange for energy.
The part of the cell where aerobic metabolism takes place. Think of a cell as a town and the mitochondria as the factory that converts the stored energy into usable energy. If food is natural gas, and usable energy is electricity, the mitochondria are the power plants. But remember, mitochondria can only work when they have enough oxygen to process glucose or fatty acids. If they don’t, the folks outside of the factory have to make due with sub-optimally broken down glucose and suboptimal byproducts.
Aerobic metabolism is the process of extracting ATP from glucose or fatty acids when the demand for ATP is not too great, which permits the process to take place with sufficient oxygen in the cell. This process is highly efficient and generates a lot of ATP (about 36 units, for example, from one molecule of glucose) and it’s easy to manage waste products (oxygen and carbon dioxide). The process of turning glucose and fatty acid into lots of ATP using oxygen is called ‘oxidative phosphorylation.’
Deoxyribonucleic acid, to be exact, is the so-called “building block” of life. DNA is a collection of 4 subunits (called nucleotides) that, when strung together, create a code. Think of nucleotides like letters of the alphabet. The letters can be rearranged to form words, and words can be strung together to make sentences.
If nucleotides are the letters of the alphabet, and DNA is the words and sentences, genes are the books – a collection of words strung together to tell a story. Genes tell our body what to build and how to build it, among other things. In recent years, scientists have come to identify all human genes, though we still have very little idea what most genes ‘code’ for. It’s sort of like saying we’ve read all of War and Peace, but we don’t yet understand most of it.
The breakdown product of fats (either those stored in the body or those ingested directly) which can be of various lengths (number of joined carbon atoms) and structures (doubled bonds between the carbon atoms or single bonds).
(A type of ‘functional’ radiographic study, often called a ‘pet scan’ for short, used to detect cancer in patients with a suspected tumor burden (this test can’t effectively detect small amounts of cancer and only works for ‘established’ cancers). F18 is substituted for -OH on glucose molecules, making something called 2-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (FDG), an analog of glucose. This molecule is detectable by PET scanners (because of the F18) and shows which parts of the body are most preferentially using glucose.
Phosphoinositide 3-kinase, commonly called PI3K (pronounced ‘pee-eye-three-kay’), is an enzyme (technically, a family of enzymes) involved in cell growth and proliferation. Not surprisingly, these enzymes play an important role in cancer growth and survival, and cancer cells often have mutations in the gene encoding PI3K, which render PI3K even more active. PI3Ks are very important in insulin signaling, which may in part explain their role in cancer growth, as you’ll come to understand.

The post Potential Tactics for Defeating Cancer — A Toolkit in 1,000 Words appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The 4-Hour Body - 4HB Archives - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

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Potential Tactics for Defeating Cancer — A Toolkit in 1,000 Words

A Little Backstory…

Enter Pete

Influences

Further Reading from Tim — A Top-10 List

Afterword by Tim